Re: Switching to UTF-8

On Sun, 5 May 2002, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:

> At 02 May 2002 23:54:37 +1000,
> Roger So wrote:

> > I _do_ think xkb is sufficient for Japanese though, if you limit
> > "Japanese" to only hiragana and katagana. ;)
>
> I believe that you are kidding to say about such a limitation.
> Japanese language has much less vowels and consonants than Korean,
> which results in much more homonyms than Korean.  Thus, I think

  Well, actually it's due to not so much the difference in
the number of consonants and vowels as  the fact that Korean has
both closed and open syllables while Japanese has only open syllables
that makes Japanese have a lot more homonyms than Korean.

> native Japanese speakers won't decide to abolish Kanji.

  I don't think Japanese will ever do, either.  However, I'm afraid
having too many homonyms is a little too 'feeble' a 'rationale' for
not being able to convert to all phonetic scripts like Hiragana and
Katakana. The easiest counter argument to that is how Japanese speakers
can tell which homonym is meant in oral communication if Kanji is so
important to disambiguate among homonyms. They don't have any Kanjis to
help them, (well, sometimes you may have to write down Kanjis to break
the ambiguity in the middle of conversation, but I guess it's mostly
limited to proper nouns). I heard that they don't have much trouble
because the context helps a listener a lot with figuring out which
of many homonyms is meant by a speaker. This is true in any language.
Arguably, the same thing could help readers in written communication.
Of course, using logographic/ideographic characters like Kanji certainly
helps readers very much and that should be a very good reason for Japanese
to keep Kanji in their writing system.

  English writing system is also 'logographic' in a sense (so is modern
Korean orthography in pure Hangul as it departs from the strict agreement
between pronunciation and spelling )  and a spelling reform (to make
English have a similar degree of the agreement between spelling and
pronunciation as to that in Spanish) would make it harder to read written
text depriving English written text of its 'logographic' nature. On the
other hand, it would help learners  and writers. It's always been struggle
between readers vs writers and listeners vs speakers....

> xkb can be used.  However, more than half of Japanese computer
> users use Romaji-kana conversion, two-keys-one-hiragana/katakana
> method.  The complexity of the algorithm is like two or three-key
> input method of Hangul, I think.  Do you think such an algorithm
> can be implemented as xkb?  If yes, I think Romaji-kana conversion
> (whose complexity is like Hangul input method) can be implemented
> as xkb.

  I also like to know whether it's possible with Xkb.  BTW, if
we use three-set keyboards (where leading consonants and trailing
consonants are assigned separate keys) and use U+1100 Hangul Conjoining
Jamos, Korean Hangul input is entirely possible with Xkb alone.

  Jungshik Shin