Subject: Names of ideographs - Mnemonics wanted by a desperate Westerner who loves the

From: ALB <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1992 00:25 GMT

:I can easily guess what
:":" would be called but I have no idea what symbolic name of "Kuro", the first
:character of my family name, is.  I'd have to look it up in the JIS
:standard book anyway.  So why don't we just use the codepont itself?
:-kuro (JISX0208_39x75-:)

This confirms what I always told to SC2. I even proposed a name based on the
number of strokes of each radical (if my memory is good SC2/WG3 N 125), but
the Japanese told me that they could not agree on Chinese methods, which
don't count the same way as the Japanese. With today's method, they said,
they will need a piece of software to retrieve a character's coding given its
shape. My method would have been useful for all (Westerners, Japanese,
Chinese and Koreans): given the shape, and agreed an international method
(that was part of the problem between the Asians), one could have approximately
but accurately enough to look in a list, retrieved the name of the character,
and hence, its coding.
Given the coding (and we are back to today's method, which I hate, being a lover
of Chinese characters with enough notions of Chinese to write a letter), of
course, it's easy to find the character, but the reverse is still not true...

                   Alain LaBont/e
                   Minist\ere des Communications du Qu/ebec