Subject: Re: hanzi coding and fonts

From: Ross Paterson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1993 12:26:00 BST

[email-masked] wrote:
> I think a STRUCTURED coding scheme is a necessity, ultimately,
> full stop.

> For example, a freind of mine has a Chinese name with the hanzi
> "ge" (song in English, 歌 in hz code) in it.  However, maybe
> he is a brother, he didn't like the hanzi which literaly reads
> "brother (哥, the left part) in debt (欠, the right part)".
> He changed that hanzi to a new one he created which literaly reads
> "brother (哥, the right part) in speaking (言, the left part)".
> Both he and I don't know if it is in the KangXi ZiDian, but it is
> definitly NOT in GB-2312 nor in Big5 and thus NOT in UNICODE.

It is in Unicode: it's U+8B0C (the character is in JIS X0208-1990,
KSC 5657-1991, and is also a user character in CNS 11643-1986).  This
particular character was an ancient variant of 歌 ge1 "song", so
your friend has merely repeated history, but I wonder to what extent it
is desirable to have people creating new characters at will.  After all,
the function of a writing system is to communicate.

Unicode/ISO-10646 has 5140 characters that are not in GB 2312-80 or
Big-5; as well as Japanese and Korean standards, it covers thousands of
characters from the various extended GB ranges.  People may find that
it gives a much better coverage of old texts.

Nevertheless, the CJK Joint Research Group are considering proposals
to make the encoding extensible: one is to define combining characters
corresponding to the 214 traditional radicals.  A rare character might
be coded by the Unicode of its base followed by a Unicode representing
a radical to be added to the base, just like an accent added to a Latin
letter (though many of those are precoded).  In the proposal I heard of,
there was no plan to specify which form of the radical was used (say for
the "heart" radical) or where it would be placed relative to the base.
The encoding would not say how to draw the character; it would just
provide a means for specifying it.  Also, if a character could be directly
encoded, it would be illegal to use the composed form.  It seemed to me
that a method that knew more about variant forms and positions would be
more flexible, but they're reluctant to put too much specific linguistic
information in the multi-lingual encoding; in any case some hanzi-based
scripts like Vietnamese Chu Nom built characters using different rules.
--
Ross Paterson <[email-masked]>
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London SW7