Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 18:37:38 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: perhaps@yes.no, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: blocksize on devfs entries (and related) Message-ID: <19971215183738.35448@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <199712150658.XAA26680@usr09.primenet.com>; from Terry Lambert on Mon, Dec 15, 1997 at 06:58:53AM %2B0000 References: <19971215073048.57829@lemis.com> <199712150658.XAA26680@usr09.primenet.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Mon, Dec 15, 1997 at 06:58:53AM +0000, Terry Lambert wrote: >>> When you think about it, it is fairly seldom an average user need to >>> display multiple languages in the same document. >> >> It's fairly seldom that an average user will need to run more than one >> program at a time, so what's all this fuss about multitasking >> operating systems? >> >> I often need to display multiple languages at once. In European >> countries, such as Norway, they may need to display English, Swedish >> and Norwegian in a single document. Sure, you can represent all of >> those with ISO 8859-1, but think about the Japanese, who have four >> alphabets anyway, and the Singaporeans, who have four national >> languages, each potentially with its own character set. In those >> countries the requirement is very frequent. > > The Japanese can represent 21 languages. There is Unicode round-trip > capability for JIS 208 + JIS 212. > > What is missing is the ability to seperate a bilingual Chinese and > Japanese document, such that a Japanese does not have to sully his > eyes with Chinese pretending to be Japanese. I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese document without Kanji. I suppose it's possible, but it's not common. On the other hands, I have seen Japanese texts *only* in Kanji. What do the Japanese here say? Does Terry's statement make practical sense? > I think there is a valid need for the ability to multinationalize; the > use of translation consoles and linguistic scholarship are two of the > examples where this would be needed (but neither have the proposed > alternatives provided code pages for "Linear B"...). > > But multinationalization is the exception, not the rule, I would guess that outside the US it's the rule. In that connection, a joke I heard in India earlier this year: What do you call somebody who speaks four languages? -- quadrilingual. What do you call somebody who speaks three languages? -- trilingual. What do you call somebody who speaks two languages? -- bilingual. What do you call somebody who speaks only one language -- American. > and the ability to do the work is cumbersome, but adequately > provided by the ability to produce Compound Documents. Certainly the American approach that it's the "exception" doesn't make things easier. > I think this fuss is political. I think it will go away when the > first company prodices something which works. I'm not sure which fuss you're talking about, but then, I came in after things had been going a while. Certainly I'd expect people to be happier when they have something which works. And I'd lay a bet that the winning solution will come from Europe or Asia. > People, in general, do not give a damn about the underlying > technology; they care about whether the underlying technilogy works > to provide them with what they see in the forground, and _how_ it > does this is a "don't care" state. To wit Microsoft. Greg
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19971215183738.35448>