From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Fri Jan 26 2007 - 23:24:27 CST
On Jan 25, 2007, at 8:49 PM, vunzndi@vfemail.net wrote:
> Quoting "John H. Jenkins" <jenkins@apple.com>:
>
>> Well, Vietnam gets the privilege because it pays to participate in
>> the
>> IRG. Maybe we should more broadly advertise the fact -- participate
>> in the IRG and get your own letter in the acronym for East Asian
>> ideographic languages! :-)
>>
>
> Some countries only permit participation in the IRG through the
> national body.
Which is part of reason for the smiley.
You make an excellent point, though. The PRC is big -- really, really
big. (Insert your favorte Douglas Adams quote here.) There have been
unpleasant issues getting Cantonese and Hong Kong/Macao place- and
people names under control. Taiwanese is still an under-researched
area. Think about how much effort has needs to be done there.
And then think about the PRC.
What people forget is that the big focus in computerization of Chinese
hitherto has been standard written Mandarin *and* major proper nouns.
While I personally doubt we'll ever fill up Plane 3 with additional
sinograms, we will in all likelihood use a large chunk of it, and that
*without* (for example) the several thousand variant glyphs from the
Korean tripitaka.
And all this work has to be funneled through the one IRG delegation.
It's the biggest delegation and the best-funded, but it is also the
smallest relation to the work which it has to do.
========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jhjenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jan 26 2007 - 23:26:08 CST