Re: CJK combining components (was RE: "Giga ...)

Ar 25 Oct 2000, ag 21:48 scríobh Thomas Chan
fán ábhar "Re: CJK combining components (was R":

> On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Jon Babcock wrote:
>
> > If the brachymorphic (shortened) forms of hemigrams were introduced as an
> > additional, usually optional, attribute of the hemigram notation, then my
> > original example, wang4 (forget) and mang2 (busy), would also pose no problem.
>
> Do we consider sequencing to matter? If so, then wang4 'forget' (U+5FD8)
> and mang2 'busy' (U+5FD9) can be distinguished without distinguishing full
> vs. shortened forms [of the 'heart' element, located at the bottom of
> U+5FD8 and on the left side in U+5FD9].
>
> If sequencing is not taken into account, then there are plenty of
> characters that will need some other method to distinguish them (see my
> "ba" and "jie" examples from an earlier post), perhaps positioning.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'distinguish' here, but from following this
thread from the Unicode list I don't think it should be an issue. The idea
as I understand it was to make font creation easier and font size smaller by
composing the *glyphs* from components, not to represent the encoded
characters as components. Each character would still have a Unicode
codepoint (for backwards compatibility with Unicode & national standards if
nothing else) and so would be easily distinguishable. Doing the encoding by
components seems to me to be introducing unnecessary complexity, for instance
wouldn't you then need a non-spacing character separator to show where a
character ended?

> > A more serious challenge ... but I'm sure there will be more ... to the idea
> > of a hemigramic notation for *any* Chinese characters may be trying to deal
> > with characters such as the one Thomas Chan mentioned at URL,
> > http://member.nifty.ne.jp/Gat_Tin/kanji/sinji.htm
> > 5th down from the top. I'm still trying to get my mind around this one.

A fascinating site...pity I don't have any Japanese.

> I would question whether that character is even part of the same system as
> all of the rest that we are dealing with; while its components are the
> same, the way it's assembled is not.

> In addition, I'd also question if it is a character, rather than a symbol.

I had the same reaction. It seems more of a charm/symbol/madala than a
regular word.

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