Subject: Re: Han Character Code Ordering

From: Erik M. van der Poel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 90 15:57:40 +0900

> > As far as Unicode and collation are
> > concerned, UniHan is probably the way to go. ISO 10646 is somewhat at
> > a disadvantage in this respect.
> 
> I would like to have this spelled out:
> For Unicode UniHan is OK, that is ordering by most common pronounciation
> for the single Han character is OK?

Actually, if you look carefully at Joe's message, you will notice that
the UniHan scheme orders the characters by radical/stroke only:

# The layout of the Unicode "UniHan" collection is:
#     Level 1: radical/stroke
#     Level 2: radical/stroke
#     Level 3: radical/stroke
#     ....

I think that UniHan is the way to go for Unicode because it is simple
and uniform. You cannot do this for pronunciations because the
pronunciations differ from country to country. (Of course, the
radical/stroke count differs between mainland China (simplified) and
Taiwan (traditional), but I won't go into that here. Ain't my problem.
:-)

> Can this ordering also be used for 10646 and X0208 and X0212?

Well, you can't change the ordering of 0208 because that's carved in
stone. 0212 seems to be largely based on radical/stroke already.

But for 10646, we may still be able to send some ideas to put some or
all of the Han characters (in the basic multilingual plane and in each
country's planes) in some radical/stroke order.

> Is this ordering (on pronounciation) also OK for China and Korea?
> Or are Chinese and/or Koreanese more used to radicals/stroke count
> ordering?
> 
> Keld Simonsen

Joe wrote a bit about this too:

# Phonetic-ordered dictionaries are more common in China, since the simplified
# characters are harder to accommodate in the radical/stroke system.

I don't know about Korean. Perhaps someone else on this list would
like to comment?

Erik