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Re: I18N/M17N?


From: Neil Jerram
Subject: Re: I18N/M17N?
Date: 11 May 2001 09:13:26 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Blandy <address@hidden> writes:

    Jim> Unicode is (or was) controversial in Japan.  For the benefit
    Jim> of other readers, I'll summarize my understanding of the
    Jim> conflict.  [...]

Thanks - very interesting!

    Jim> So, essentially, this means that all Japanese programmers are
    Jim> accustomed to having text indicate not only the characters,
    Jim> but also the *language* those characters represent.  In
    Jim> particular, they feel it is important that the encoding
    Jim> distinguish between Chinese text and Japanese text.  Now,
    Jim> they all agree that Chinese and Japanese use the same
    Jim> characters.  [...]

So if one comes across a piece of paper with Chinese characters
written on it, how does one know whether to read it as Chinese text or
as Japanese text?

As you also say, this is not specific to Japanese/Chinese; it happens
for almost all language combinations, and is usually solved (in the
brain) by assessing the context in which the characters appear.

So, is it that the language information crept in by accident and then
programmers found that it had particular uses?

        Neil




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