Stage Linguistique wrote:

>
> Marco wrote:
> > not to mention the 70,000+ Chinese "characters"
> > which could have been avoided with a "composing
> > radicals" approach).
>
> A Chinese character is written as <radical>+<something
> else>
> The number of <radical>'s is a limited set (214), but
> the number of <something else>'s is not. What you are
> envisioning would be either (a) impossible to
> implement or (b) far too complex to use by end-users
> (how many Chinese use CangJie?)

The form of a Chinese character cannot vary without limit and in
unpredictable ways. The number 214 is not sacrosanct, and there are
around 900 "phonetics" in one list.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...