perl-unicode

Re[2]: Do Chinese use Katakana? What is 1988.enc?

2002-03-23 20:32:17
Hello, Jean-Michel, Andreas, Dan, Autrijus, Mark!
             (In the order of message arrival :-)
Special hello to Larry!

Anton> Do Chinese use Katakana?

Jean-Michel> Not as far as I know. Hiragana / Katakana is
Jean-Michel> exclusively a Japanese
Jean-Michel> thing ain't it?

Andreas> In Chinese script  Hiragana and Katakana are not used.

Larry> Yes.  Bopomofo is the Chinese equivalent.

Dan> Bopomofo is more like international phonetic symobols; use
Dan> in education but not in real life.
Dan> And even that seems to have been
Dan> replaced with Roman equivalent of Ping Ying.

Autrijus> Bopomofo is roughly equivalent to hiragana; i.e. it's used
Autrijus> to spell out Chinese characters, and is the dominant
Autrijus> input  method in Taiwan

Mark> 1) Hiragana is part of the Japanese written language, whereas Bopomofo
Mark> is not part of Chinese written language--Bopomofo is an aid for
Mark> pronunciation, used primarily for educating children or for computer
Mark> input in Taiwan;

Autrijus> The online writing in Taiwan is abundant with Bopomofo now, although
Autrijus> admittedly not in the same role as hiragana.

Mark> 2) Bopomofo is alphabetic, whereas Hiragana is syllabic (i.e.
Mark> Bopomofo (albeit inconsistently) represent consonant/vowel sounds,
Mark> whereas Hiragana represent the pronunciation of an entire syllable).

Autrijus> This is true.

Talking on perl-unicode, is a good way to learn
things about languages!  I like it :-))

But, coming back to my original mail:

1988.enc seems to use 0xA1-0xFE the same way as 0201.enc
does.

I understand it means that when somebody asks for
the GB 1988 encoding he gets katakana characters
encoded/decoded to/from the GR region.

Is this okay?

My understanding is that GB 1988 should be 7-bit, just like
ASCII.

And I would also advocate the following names/aliases for it:
GB_1988-80
ISO646-CN
this what both IANA registry and RFC 1345 call it.

My heartiest regards, Anton