Re: Kana and Case (was [totally OT] Unicode terminology)

From: Thomas Chan (thomas@atlas.datexx.com)
Date: Wed Nov 22 2000 - 14:48:15 EST


On Wed, 22 Nov 2000 11digitboy@bolt.com wrote:

> If the difference between "A" and "a" is called "case",
> what is the difference between HIRAGANA LETTER YA
> and KATAKANA LETTER YA called? (I think either of
> those letters would do to describe this with the
> new code pages. The description would be enhanced
> by liberal application of HIRAGANA-KATAKANA LONG
> VOWEL MARK.)

Maybe you should also be asking what the difference between U+0041 LATIN
CAPITAL LETTER A, U+0391 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA, and U+0410 CYRILLIC
CAPITAL LETTER A is called.
 
However, although U+3084 HIRAGANA LETTER YA and U+30E4 KATAKANA LETTER YA
are both derived from U+4E54 (the former from a cursive form; the latter
from a simplification of the print form), it doesn't hold for most other
kana, such as U+3042 HIRAGANA LETTER A and U+30A2 KATAKANA LETTER A, which
are derived from a cursive form of U+5B89 and a simplification of the
print form of U+963F, respectively.

I don't get what you mean by "new code pages". Who's creating those
anymore?
 
Hiragana, unlike katakana, doesn't use U+30FC KATAKANA-HIRAGANA
PROLONGED SOUND MARK for writing long vowels. (Why does it have this name
in Unicode?) What's this "HIRAGANA-KATAKANA LONG VOWEL MARK"?--I see no
such thing.

 
> I like "Astral Planes" better.
> Will they include INUKTITUT VIGESIMAL DIGITs?

I don't. I write in Cantonese and some of contents of Plane 2 are very
much down-to-earth for me. Are you a musician? If so, then Plane 1 would
be important to you, too.

Throwing around terms like "Astral Planes", whether official or not, will
just engender lack of credibility for Unicode, which has already happened
to some extent among people who heard about some "Klingon" (in the Private
Use Area) in Unicode.

Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu



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