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Not to say there aren’t problems with CJK unification. It’s difficult or impossible to represent old family names or newly coined characters without some means
by evincarofautumn 12y ago
Not to say there aren’t problems with CJK unification. It’s difficult or impossible to represent old family names or newly coined characters without some means of composing characters from radicals—even if you do want “precomposed” characters a majority of the time, as is the case with, say, é (00E9) versus é (0065 0301).
As far as these characters being “the same”, I think it’s better to say they’re analogues. A in English is analogous to A in Polish—both are Latin alphabets, but neither is the Latin alphabet, and these languages use “the same” letter quite differently. And, say, Å is a letter in Swedish, but in English it’s A with a separate accent mark.
These are also just as well analogous to Α in Greek or А in Cyrillic, so hell, I would actually support the author’s “Greco Unification” strawman if it could be done in a principled way.
- vorg 12y ago> I would actually support the author’s “Greco Unification” strawman if it could be done in a principled way A 5 year old tech note by a Unicode Consortium member at http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn26 http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn26 gives 7 reasons "why the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts have been separately encoded, rather than being encoded as a single script", and 12 reasons why the Han script was unified. Edit: These 7 reasons make a good case why such "Greco Unification" wouldn't work.
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- evincarofautumn 12y agoVery good points. That’s why I said “if it could be done in a principled way”—I don’t think it can.
- kibibu 12y agoI'm not convinced that this isn't just post-hoc justification. All seven reasons boil down to "It's always been done this way". I don't see how "a" in the Latin alphabet as used in English is any different to the "a" in the Latin alphabet used in Polish - in particular they are rendered in the same way. Yet the article claims that even though Chinese and Japanese versions of characters now appear wildly different they still represent the same script so bad luck. Should the Unicode consortium be concerned with the glyphs or the semantics? Seems they are selectively doing both.