On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Ayers, Mike wrote:
> > From: Marco Cimarosti [mailto:marco.cimarosti@essetre.it]
> > BTW, I notice that a single "Chinese" entry is listed. This
> > should probably
> > be split in several entries for the various Chinese languages (or
> > "dialects", e.g. Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). This
> > split may be handy
> > because the different languages could need different information.
>
> They don't. The joy of unification!
No, they do. While the dominant way that Chinese languages are written
today, which is based on Mandarin Chinese, has been well supported since
pre-Unicode 3.0 days, other Chinese languages have faced the problem of
many unencoded (or yet-to-be-encoded) characters. I've written on this
matter on this list before in the past, principly about Yue Chinese (=~
Cantonese), but also applicable to other Chinese languages.
Some also require different scripts, such as the Dungan living in the
former Soviet Union, who write in Cyrillic (I've been told all the
characters they need are encoded), or some Min Chinese, who write in whole
or part using the characters in the Bopomofo Extended block (Unicode
3.0) and/or Latin (using certain letter and diacritics that weren't always
encoded). There's also the Hunan women who write in the unencoded Nushu
script that was discussed on this rather recently.
And this is without going into historical alternative ways of writing
Chinese, such as the prolific Guanhua Zimu alphabet/syllabary used in the
1900s-1920s.
There is also the blind, for which Braille schemes exist for at least
Mandarin and Cantonese, although I'll concede that Braille could be listed
for almost any language.
And then there are various transliteration schemes, which although they
are not anyone's primary script, but which are widely employed, such as
Hanyu Pinyin (people do ask, as legacy GB2312 and Big5 character sets
don't have them, or only include ugly full-width versions) for Mandarin,
or Yale for Cantonese (e.g., people ask if a precomposed "m" with a grave
accent is encoded, as that is need to transcribe the negative).
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
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