From keld@dkuug.dk Wed Feb 27 19:15:11 1991 Received: by dkuug.dk (5.64+/8+bit/IDA-1.2.8) id AA24106; Wed, 27 Feb 91 19:15:11 +0100 Date: Wed, 27 Feb 91 19:15:11 +0100 From: Keld J|rn Simonsen Message-Id: <9102271815.AA24106@dkuug.dk> To: i18n@dkuug.dk, wg14@dkuug.dk Subject: Alain LaBonte' on ideogram naming X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 I am forwarding this as it did not seem to make it to the wg14 and i18n lists. keld --- From ISO10646@JHUVM.BITNET Wed Feb 27 19:00:30 1991 Received: from danpost.uni-c.dk by dkuug.dk via EUnet with SMTP (5.64+/8+bit/IDA-1.2.8) id AA23723; Wed, 27 Feb 91 18:59:17 +0100 Received: from vm.uni-c.dk by danpost.uni-c.dk (5.65/4.7) id AA16833; Wed, 27 Feb 91 17:59:28 GMT Message-Id: <9102271759.AA16833@danpost.uni-c.dk> Received: from vm.uni-c.dk by vm.uni-c.dk (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 5989; Wed, 27 Feb 91 19:01:02 DNT Received: from SEARN.SUNET.SE by vm.uni-c.dk (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 8486; Wed, 27 Feb 91 19:01:02 DNT Received: from SEARN.BITNET by SEARN.SUNET.SE (Mailer R2.05) with BSMTP id 7215; Wed, 27 Feb 91 19:02:12 +0100 Date: Tue, 26 Feb 91 14:28:00 GMT Reply-To: Multi-byte Code Issues Sender: Multi-byte Code Issues From: ALB Subject: Naming of ideograms To: Multiple recipients In-Reply-To: Your subject -- Re: (wg14 46) Re: (i18n 80) Re: AT&T Bell Labs wishes for shorthand character na X-Charset: US-DK X-Char-Esc: 29 Status: RO I don't think as I said earlier that naming ideograms would be a great idea for convention communication. The retrieval of any shape's coding will continue to be impossible with such a scheme for a foreigner (i.e. a German wanting to code Kanji, a Japnaese wanting to code Hanzi or a Chinese wanting to code Hanja...) particularly if Han unification was not achieved. I proposed a method of identification of ideograms (and Western characters as well) that would be based on the traditional way Chinese characters are searched in a dictionary, i.e. independently of phonetics. This paper is JTC1/SC2/WG3 N125. I will probably rewrite it to improve naming of Western characters (and if I have time, to draw a list for 6937, if Johan does not do it before me...) This naming scheme would be based on decomposition of radicals in their number of strokes, and structured like a dictionary. From the shape one would compose the identifier (or a very close approximation that can be found in an alphanumerically ordered list) and retrieve coding (or codings if Han unification is not achieved). An index given phonetics in pinyin or hiragana or Korean phonetics could also be done at the same time, why not? Of course, given the coding, the identifier is obvious. If the japanese wish so (and Korean and Chinese as well), another index could be done by name, in their own respective countries (National standards) but it will not be very useful for international communications. Of course also, in N125, I proposed to use Xi\and\ai H\any~u C/idi~an (Modern Chinese Character Dictionary) as the basic reference. To avoid diplomatic problems, it would be more advisable to include the full reference in the standard, with the searching method, to make all this independent of any particular countries' usages (The Chinese have added radicals to the traditional ones). My idea about short ids is twofold: 1st have a shorter identifier than names (some characters are identified by around 80 characters in 10646), and nonambiguous (References to national standards for ideograms point to a lot of identical names), and 2nd to remove any linguistic hegemony in this naming business (the ids I propose won't have to be translated in other languages than English, which would decrease efficiency: of course each person will translate the identifier in his/her own language, but English will not have to be used in other languages). Just to give an idea about the naming problem for ideograms. Pinyin "YI" has 80 different characters. If tone diacritics are added, the average would be around 20 characters per case. This would be non unique naming; adding numbers to each case would still leave the problem of impossibility to find the identifier and coding(s) for foreigners. Alain LaBont/e