identifiers & "unialpha"

[Kristian]

On Sat, 23 Sep 2006 11:40:08 +0300, Kevin Bealer <kevinbealer at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Thomas Kuehne wrote:
>>> Walter Bright schrieb am 2006-09-22:
>>>> What is CJK?
>>>
>>> CJK: Chinese, Japanese & Korean
>>> 0x20000 .. 0x2A6D6 CJK Ideograph Extension B
>>> 0x2F800 .. 0x2FA1D CJK COMPATIBILITY IDEOGRAPHS
>>  Thank-you.
>>
> ...
>>>
>>> Task at hand: Create a table of all characters used by humans all over
>>> the world and minimize friction due to political issues
>>> (e.g. characters' names). Except for bug fixes (typos...) the unicode  
>>> people
>>> usually only extend previous versions of the standard.
>>  Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are hardly obscure so I don't see why  
>> the character sets for them seem to need large numbers of additions  
>> this late in the game.
>
> I think the big-alphabet languages tend to coin new letters somewhat  
> like other languages do words (but maybe less frequently), but I'm not  
> sure about that.
>
> I have heard, though, that Chinese was simplified to a smaller set with  
> different appearances during the revolution and the various political  
> upheavals since.  They have been adding letters back since as they  
> discover they are really needed -- so these get put into Unicode.
>
> If you've read "1984" by Orwell, it's something like the motivation for  
> NewSpeak.  Old literature is written in the old letters, and is  
> disappearing because the public can't read it.





> It's a kind of history censorship - you can't translate the old Chinese  
> literature because they want to destroy the old culture as it competes  
> philosophically with Communism.
>
> Essentially, they didn't have to burn all the old books -- they just  
> burned all the old printing presses.
>
> Kevin

If that's the case, I'm very sorry to hear that! :(