RE: Hangzhou-style numerals

From: Tom Emerson (Tree@basistech.com)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2000 - 09:55:25 EST


Greetings,

Marco answered your questions about the similarity between the (missnamed)
Hangzhou numerals and similar looking glyphs in the CJK Unified Ideographs
block.

With regards to your second question: I'm not sure why you would want to put
cross-references to these in Section 7, unless it is to indicate the
explicit inequality between the hangzhou numerals and the ideographs block.
What did you have in mind?

I think an explanation of these numerals would be useful, but as far as I
know this hasn't been done with in Unicode n.*, 1<=n<=3, or in
ISO/IEC-10646-1. My paper on these numbers provides an overview of their
etymology:

http://cymru.basistech.com/~tree/papers/Hangzhou.pdf

Since I made that paper available several correspondents have sent me
further references to these numbers, which I will be integrating into a new
revision soon.

As my paper shows, these numbers should be called the "Suzhou" numerals,
though Ken W. has indicated that the standard name will *not* be changed in
future versions of ISO/IEC-10646 or Unicode. [Which bothers me a bit:
perpetuating a mistake in an international standard is never a Good Thing]

        -tree

--
Tom Emerson                                          Basis Technology Corp.
Language Hacker                                    http://www.basistech.com
  "Beware the lollipop of mediocrity: lick it once and you suck forever."

-----Original Message----- From: Otto Stolz [mailto:Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de] Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 5:20 AM To: Unicode List Subject: Hangzhou-style numerals

Hello,

I am still waiting for my copy of TUS 3.0, so the following questions are based on my copy of TUS 2.0. If these questions are already answered in TUS 3.0, then a short reply saying so would suffice; otherwise, some amendmends should be made in the forthcoming version of The Unicode Standard.

Also, I do know next to nothing about the CJK writing system(s), just made a few observations, when I looked at pages 7-218, 7-219, and 7-256 of TUS 2.0.

- Is there any difference (and, if so, what) between the following Hangzhou-style numerals and "ordinary" CJK characters? U+3021 vs. U+4E28 U+3024 vs. U+4E42 U+3026 vs. U+4EA0 U+3029 vs. U+5973

- Why are there no cross references in the Hangzhou-style Numerals block (such as for U+3030, on the same page)? Cf. p. 7-1.

- Would an explanation of these numerals be appropriate on p. 6-94?

Best wishes, Otto Stolz

- Are there any more almost-homographs I haven't found?



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:59 EDT