identifiers & "unialpha"

[Kevin Bealer]

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