Re: writing Chinese dialects

From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Fri Jan 26 2007 - 23:08:35 CST

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    On Jan 25, 2007, at 11:16 PM, vunzndi@vfemail.net wrote:

    >
    >>
    >> John H. Jenkins wrote:
    >>>> Naturally there are political aspects to all of this. On the
    >>>> mainland, as you say, the push is toward Mandarin.
    >
    > Regarding Mandarin the outstanding matter would seem to be the
    > encoding of as yet unencoded proper nouns ( names of people and
    > places in modern use, required for ID cards, Bank Accounts,
    > Electricity bills etc). Once these are done I'm sure more attention
    > will be given to other things.
    >

    Place names are clearly a huge source of characters needing encoding,
    and I know that the current emphasis of the PRC's delegation to the
    IRG is along these lines. Even a tiny spot on the Chinese map like
    Macao needed to have a number of new characters added to handle some
    of their place names.

    > The emphasis on the using of standard Mandarin well still present,
    > in the mainland there is also a gradual realisation that in some
    > situations there is a need to use other characters, and that with
    > the ever increase use of computers that these should be encoded. At
    > present such publications are produced by ad hoc methods, which
    > whilst suffcient for printing, are not suitable for digital storage
    > as text,
    >

    Thanks for the additional info, and the sentiment is very well-put.

    ========
    John H. Jenkins
    jenkins@apple.com
    jhjenkins@mac.com
    http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/



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