Subject: Re: [idn] An ignorant question about TC<-> SC

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 23:43:29 EDT

In a message dated 2001-10-23 11:13:14 Pacific Daylight Time, [email-masked] 
writes:

>  On the other hand, one problem is more severe
>  than in the Chinese case: in the general case, a Serbo-Croatian
>  string written in Cyrillic cannot be distinguished, on a
>  character string basis, from uses of Cyrillic for other languages
>  (e.g., Russian), which should not be mapped and, similarly, a
>  string written in Roman-based characters cannot be distinguished,
>  on a character string basis, from the Roman-based characters of
>  another language (English?) which, again, cannot be mapped.

But this problem *does* exist in the Chinese case, because certain Han 
characters can also be used to write Japanese or (I've been told) Korean.  In 
a Japanese or Korean context, it wouldn't make any sense to map the correct 
"traditional" Han character to a simplified "equivalent"; the simplified 
character is only equivalent if the language is Chinese.  And we're not 
tagging languages, so we don't know when this mapping is appropriate and when 
it's not.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California

---

From: YangWoo Ko <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 13:23:55 +0900

On Tue, Oct 23, 2001 at 11:43:29PM -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
> character is only equivalent if the language is Chinese.

Dear Doug Ewell,

Even though your statement is not wrong, more clarification is needed.
There are two types of simplified chinese characters. One type is 
traditional (oops) one and the other type is relatively new one.

First type of traditional simplified chinese characters was invented
over long period of time among four countries (China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan).
Some of them are common to all for countries, some of them are only
used in one of those countries. (Let's call it type I)

Second type of relatively new simplified chinese characters was invented
around 50 years ago (I am not sure) by the People Republic of China
government. (Let's call it type II)

In Korea, we do not use type II. For type I, even though we do not
decided any policy, but we may easily prevent disputes by registration
policy.

But, if Unicode incorporate new rule to NFC, it may affect the usage
of chinese characters in any of those countries who are sharing CJK
area.

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