On Sun, 20 Oct 91 14:37:53 +0100, Keld J|rn Simonsen wrote:
Anyway JIS encoding will be gibberish on unextended hardware.
So we need another presentation of JIS (and other CJK) 2022 encoding.
So then it will be gibberish on Japanese equipment too?
We're trying to explain to you folks that there already is a means of
expressing Japanese on non-Japanese equipment. It's called romanization. For
various reasons, it is vastly inferior to the native Japanese writing system;
specifically, it can only express certain aspects of the spoken language and
not the considerably-richer written language. Moreover, any attempt to create
a romanized encoding as a direct translation from the writing system, as
opposed to a transliteration of the writing system, is doomed to failure.
Another problem is that not as multi-character words are compound words.
For example, the character for `big, large, great' is read as DAI or TAI in
the ON (Chinese-origin) reading, but oo(kii) in the kun (Japanese-origin)
reading. A character for `harmony, peace, to soften, to calm down' is read as
WA in the ON-reading and Yawa(ragu) in the kun reading.
However, the `big' and the `peace' characters together are read as `Yamato'
(Japan). This is *not* a compound word, it is a single word written with two
characters. If you use DAIWA or any writing system indicating such a
compound, a Japanese would be totally puzzled, even bewildered, just as an
English speaker is on seeing English text written purely phonetically.