NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/comp/std/internat/1147

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-11 | 3.9 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Glenn A. Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Date: 11 Jan 1993 22:14:49 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Lines: 57
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu
Keywords: Unicode ISO10646 CharacterEncoding

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
>>>This [language attribution] *must* be in-band for multilingual Unicode
>>>documents if we are to overcome the (I believe reasonable) objection to
>>>the lack of information for display localization.
>>
>>No, this is incorrect.  Language attribution *is not* necessary for
>>the legible display of any multilingual Unicode data.  That is, unless
>>you consider that font attribution is necessary for display.  Neither
>>Ohta-san's claims nor Vadim's claims have shown that language attributes
>>are necessary to perform legible display.  If you (or anyone else) can
>>demonstrably show this to be the case, then I welcome you to do it.
>>Otherwise, you can take my word (having implemented a Unicode rendering
>>engine) that language attributes are not necessary.
>
>You misunderstand the basis of the objections.  The objections are not
>made on the basis of legibility, but rather on the [apparent] imposition
>of cultural imperialism on those languages undergoing unification.  The
>point is esthetic in many cases, rather than technical.
>
>I can say that an English text mixing normal, italic, and bold characters
>will "look like hell" when printed in a single font.  The point is
>language attribution so that font selection is possible.  In a monolingual
>document, the locale information (ala file attribute or per system) is
>sufficient to provide the rendering clues; a multilingual document is
>a compound document.

No, I don't misunderstand the basis, I deny that it is a basis.  Furthermore,
the accusation of "cultural imperialism" is simply nonsense.  The unified
Han characters in Unicode (10646) were created by joint agreement of
delegations from China, Japan, and Korea.  If there were anything to this
claim, do you think that these delegations would have agreed to both the
principle and the results of the unification?  I rather doubt it.
Rather, the claims of cultural imperialism are being made precisely by
those persons who *would* like to impose cultural imperialism in the form
of cultural purity.  The arguments that are being made about CJK
unification are of the same order as an argument which would have the
English alphabet segregated from the French alphabet on the principle
that unification would destroy the unique identity of the alphabets.

I have repeatedly asked those who make these ridiculous claims to back
up their assertions with hard data, e.g., a study showing how Japanese
can't read Japanese text printed with a (traditional) Chinese font and
vice versa.  No evidence has been offered.  The only arguments that can
be made for differences are based on aesthetic or (artificial) legal grounds.
The determination of aesthetic and legal distinctions (e.g., forms of
a letter in a signature) are patently *not* the domain of character set
encodings.  They are the domain of rich text.  Therefore, the objections
voiced thus far are invalid (since we are talking about a character set
here, and not about a typsetting system.)

By the way, a display of CJK Han characters with a single font
irrespective of languages *does not* "look like hell", certainly
not in the same way that a mixed font style English text would
look with a single font.

Glenn Adams
Cambridge, Massachusetts