On Jun 4, 2004, at 3:09 AM, 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?)
>

Cangjie and shape-based input methods are relatively popular in Hong
Kong. This is largely because there is no generally-used Cantonese
romanization and school children receive basically no education in how
to analyze phonetically what they speak, so they tend to find phonetic
input methods awkward.

Meanwhile, I tend to agree, pace Marco. Combining systems for Han are
seductive because of the productive nature of the script, but actually
creating one that *works* is a real pain.

========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@...
jhjenkins@...
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/