From: vunzndi@vfemail.net
Date: Thu Jan 25 2007 - 22:57:28 CST
Well said. long live CJKDBZTYMV characters
Not being a national/regional(as in Hong kong) language, these have
been almost entirely overlooked. At least one of the groups below has
over 10 million people, a bigger population than quite a few countries
in the world. This is not just a southern China thing but also the
same could be said of many other parts of China were non-Han Chinese
live. Though admittedly there are more such groups in Southern China
than elsewhere.
Reaserch was done in the first half of the 20th century and from the
1980's onwards research has been increasing, though admittedly there
is a lot of room for improvement. There is at least for some of these
enough research to make a start on encoding, one does not need to know
every character, before starting to encode. Encoding the well
researched parts then makes it easier to research the rest. Though it
would seem that many researchers are not always very aware of what has
been done by others, and it almost goes without saying much literaure
is not in English.
I have been researching such characters, for about five years, the
limited amount of existing research doesn't make it hard to find
something new. I have also been consisdering some of the encoding and
other computer realted issues involved and would be very interested to
know of others working on this area.
John
Quoting "Martin J. Heijdra" <mheijdra@princeton.edu>:
> In addition to Chinese "dialects", there are also quite a few other
> non-Chinese languages in South China which at one point or another
> have been written with adapted Chinese characters, in ways not
> unlike new Vietnamese or Cantonese characters were formed (and in
> some cases very possibly predating and being the basis of the
> latter): Dong, Bouyei, many Zhuang and other Tai language versions,
> Yao, various Miao languages. All very dispersed and uncontrolled,
> and certainly under researched. But I have always thought that the
> term CJKV privileges Vietnamese in a way that's not really
> warranted; one could start talking about CJKDBZTYMV?.
>
>
>
> (Chinese books on such material often merely state that such
> languages were written "with Chinese characters", not pointing out
> that in many cases systematic changes were applied to the Chinese
> forms which makes them no longer standard Chinese.)
>
>
>
> Martin Heijdra
>
>
>
> _____
>
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
> On Behalf Of John H. Jenkins
> Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 4:07 PM
> To: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: Re: writing Chinese dialects
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 25, 2007, at 12:14 PM, Douglas Davidson wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> There actually are two bilingual Cantonese-English public elementary
> school programs in San Francisco
> (http://www.westportalschool.com/cip/CIP.html and
> http://portal.sfusd.edu/template/index.cfm?page=es.fong_yu
> <http://portal.sfusd.edu/template/index.cfm?page=es.fong_yu&show_descr=true&len=348descr=true&len=348); their material states that they aim for literacy in both Cantonese and English, but I haven't seen anything in enough detail to say to what extent Cantonese-specific characters might be
> used.
>
>
>
>
>
> I'll have to contact them and find out.
>
>
>
>
>
> OTOH, Unicode *has* made an effort to cull Cantonese-specific
> characters from such references as exist for such. When Extension D
> is encoded in the (hopefully) near future, there will be as
> complete a repertoire of Cantonese-specific characters as is
> reasonably possible.
>
>
>
> My impression is that Cantonese is in a better position here than
> most other dialects--that is, that there are dialect-specific
> characters used in writing other dialects, but that the usage is
> usually not as widespread or consistent as with Cantonese. Are
> these being gathered as well?
>
>
>
> Nobody has contacted Unicode with offers to do the gathering for us,
> and we don't have the resources (i.e., authoritative print sources
> and time and/or money) to do it ourselves. The only issues involved
> are practical.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Naturally there are political aspects to all of this. On the
> mainland, as you say, the push is toward Mandarin. In Taiwan there
> has recently been something of a revival of Taiwanese, but my
> impression is that this is primarily as a spoken language, and that
> when it is written, one of the romanizations is often used rather
> than characters; however, this is not first-hand information, and I
> would welcome correction on this.
>
>
>
> There are, I understand efforts, to write Taiwanese with ideographs,
> but I don't know much about them and would welcome pointers to
> additional information.
>
>
>
> As you say, there are political aspects. Cantonese is in an
> unusually good position because of the semi-independence of Hong
> Kong and Macao. There has bee a notable upsurge in the interest in
> written Cantonese and Cantonese linguistics in Hong Kong in the last
> ten years.
>
>
>
> ========
> John H. Jenkins
> jenkins@apple.com
> jhjenkins@mac.com
> http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/
>
>
>
>
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