(i) Mnemonic is much better adapted to the character sets that
reflect languages that have a relatively small repertiore of alphabetic
or phonetic characters than it is to languages with, e.g., potentially
unbounded collections of ideographic characters.
hear ! hear !
% Well, I and others are working on this, giving quite good names for
% Chinese and other characters. Then this would even be a help to
% East-asian and other peolpe (like westeners).
I am extremely skeptical. I am willing to be persuaded that you all
have managed this, but extremely doubtful the claim is true.
Until such a proposal is made and a consensus of this list has
concluded that the names are in fact somehow portable across dialects
and languages in an unambiguous manner and are as easily visually
interpreted as European languages are, then we must proceed on the
basis that there is no known suitable mnemonic encoding for
non-alphabetic languages.
Mnemonic is NOT a general solution. It is a special-case solution
for alphabetic (primarily European) languages. Admittedly many users
only use alphabetic languages, but that doesn't make it a general
solution.
(Claims to the contrary should present a hard detailed proposal,
with examples if they seek to persuade me.)
Ran
atkinson(_at_)itd(_dot_)nrl(_dot_)navy(_dot_)mil