Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 15:28:42 +0900 From: Jun-ichiro itojun Itoh <itojun@iijlab.net> To: "Allen Smith" <easmith@beatrice.rutgers.edu> Cc: Chen Hsiung Chan <frankch@waru.life.nthu.edu.tw>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <1623.897632922@coconut.itojun.org> In-Reply-To: easmith's message of Fri, 12 Jun 1998 00:55:54 -0400. <9806120055.ZM11421@beatrice.rutgers.edu>
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this thread is becoming not very suitable for "hackers" so this is my last comment ;-) >> > bzzzz, you are wrong. We Japnaese can't live without Kanji. >> > Kanji is not an extra character sets. Kanji is mandatory >> > character set for us, just like G-Z for you. Believe me, >> > I speak and write Japanese every day :-) >> That's also true for Chinese. We can not live with only >> phonetic symbols, whether that be bopomofo or pinyin or >> anything else. >Umm... so Chinese people can't talk to one another? I'd known that was >the case between the dialects, but not within them :-}. Now, I'm not >claiming that any of the current phonetic representations are >necessarily fully usable - for instance, IIRC Chinese is a tonal >language, and a phonetic representation that didn't encompass >tonalities would be incomplete - but that the space of sounds >emitable by the human voice is smaller than the number of Chinese >characters, Kanji, etcetera, and people are capable of conversing in >Mandarin, Japanese, etcetera vocally. Wow, this is the point. Phonetic expression (and sound itself) has ambiguity in Japanese/Chinese/Korean language. If you hear some sound, you can interpret that in several ways. We resolve the ambiguity by context in spoken Japanese, and by Kanji letters in written Japanese. For example, Japanese sound, "Hashi", can be translated into both "bridge" and "chopsticks". There's slight difference in sound (intonation) which makes those sound distinct. Also, Japanese sound "Saru" can be translated to "monkey (noun)" and "leaving from somewhere (verb)". In this case there's no difference in sound. We make a distinction by context for spoken Japansese, and by Kanji letters in written Japanese. Therefore, if we write "saru" in Kana (phonetic letter), we cannot figure out what these letters mean. This makes it really hard for us to read Kana-only teletype, which were used about 20 years ago. itojun To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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