Re: writing Chinese dialects

From: vunzndi@vfemail.net
Date: Fri Jan 26 2007 - 01:52:33 CST

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    Quoting "Arne <arne@linux.org.tw>:

    > Taiwan style Minnan has developed seperate from the Mainland since the
    > Japanese occupation of Taiwan (1895-1945). This has led to the situation
    > that some new words got imported from Japanese. For those, Japanese
    > Kanji are used.
    > For some characters it is difficult to find historical references, or
    > the words have been invented during time, but noone bothered to write
    > them down, so there are no standard characters to write them. In those
    > cases dictionary authors tend to "invent" new characters for them. For
    > example, one of the famous dictionaries in Taiwan, by Mr.
    > Yang Qing-Chu , lists 152 "invented" characters, most of them
    > are not encoded in Unicode. Regarding all characters in that dictionary,
    > many of them are in Extension A and B. But as I said, about the
    > "invented" characters, there is some controversy. Some scholars claim,
    > there should be correct characters available, the dictionary authors
    > just didn't research enough... but they have yet to prove these claims.
    >
    > BTW: there is no national standard for any of the local languages in Taiwan.
    >

    All characters had to be invented at some point in time -- if there
    are as you say Japanese words that have gone into Min nan, one either
    needs to write them in Japanese, channge the meaning/usage/sound of
    existing charcters or make up a new character. In pratice only the
    first and third work well, and if people don't know how to write
    Japanese .

    The lack of an agreed standard is common when national governments
    either ignore or oppose people writting down their own language. The
    unicode policy is that any widlely used characters should be encoded,
    regardless of who invented them, and hopefully all national goverments
    can agree to this.

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