Re: [tlug] Re: Unicode (Was: apache2...)

[simon colston <simon@example.com>]

On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 19:30:17 +1000 (EST)
Jim Breen <jwb@example.com> wrote:

> 
> You can only go so far addressing irrationality. With people saying that
> a 十 (kanji) can't be unified with a 十 (hanzi) because
> one is essentially Japanese and the other irrevocably Chinese, no
> addressing is possible, short of abandoning the whole process. 

But surely combining these two as being "the same" handicaps expression. 
Each character is not just a character but also has meaning and that
meaning can change depending on context.  I don't know any Chinese or
Korean but in Japanese there is a word 十字路.  (Maybe it's the same in
Chinese and Korean which sort of kills my argument but...) In this context
十 has a completely different meaning.  (There are, I am sure, hundreds of
better examples that this.)  Each character seems more like a 'word' than
a 'letter' and as the languages develop may change anyway, in both
appearance and meaning.  Saying that this things are "different" across
all the languages does not seem that irrational to me.

In contrast, characters in the alphabet have no meaning without context. 
Combining these code points across different languages is much more
reasonable because they are only abstract symbols with no meaning.  Just
because these can be combined does not necessarily infer that this is
suitable for all writing systems.


-- 
simon colston
simon@example.com