My daughter starts Japanese next year so all the discussions about the
language are very interesting to me. I can't quite work out whether
the Japanese speakers on this list want us to solve problems which are
inherent in incompatibilities between spoken and written Japanese or
whether they think we shouldn't do anything because we can't solve
those problems. Both views are irrelevant. All we want to do is give
the sender the ability to send whatever squiggly marks he wants and to
do it in such a way that the recipient sees the squiggly marks
(glyphs) that the sender intended. How the sender conveys which
pronunciation of the particular squiggly mark is intended is not our
problem: as in all languages ambiguities are solved in various ways,
usually by context. Actually I would think that a universal character
set might be very useful. For example if someone wanted to show the
pronunciation of a name as well as the Kanji representation then he
can do so using the international phonetic alphabet or in various
other ways.
On another matter:
Header-Charset: mnemonic / quoted-printable
From: "Keld J&o/rn Simonsen" <keld(_at_)dkuug(_dot_)dk>
If the From line's info becomes separated from the Header-Charset
line, is the & an &, or is it a mnemonic introducer?
I am not sure what "separated" means. Certainly they don't have to
be next to each other. The headers can be in any order without
affecting the meaning.
The obvious case is that a person with an old fashioned mailer
who does a reply will presumably lose the Header-Charset header.
So the & will lose its special meaning. However a nice property
of the mnemonic proposal is that all the information in the data
is there, and the person trying to figure it out may well be
able to work out what the charset/encoding was: certainly no
problem in this case. By contrast the encoded-variable proposal
strips out information when generating the variable name.
Bob Smart