Xref: utzoo comp.misc:7056 comp.unix.questions:16715 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!ctrsol!lll-winken!ames!eos!shelby!csli!poser From: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser) Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Marketing wizardry & handling of far-east languages. Message-ID: <10501@csli.Stanford.EDU> Date: 2 Oct 89 20:35:11 GMT References: <5557@tank.uchicago.edu> <2033@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> <1823@draken.nada.kth.se> <2262@munnari.oz.au> Reply-To: poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) Followup-To: comp.misc Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U. Lines: 24 In article <2262@munnari.oz.au> ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) writes: >At least the Egyptian Hieratic script is >dead (though from what I hear the Japanese system is nearly as complex). Actually, the Japanese system is arguably more complex than the various Egyptian scripts (hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic). The number of characters is larger. Egyptian used only a few hundred, whereas basic modern Japanese is about 3000 and lots more are possible. Japanese also presents the difficulty that a single character typically has two classes of readings, one consisting of native words, one consisting of loans from Chinese. Japanese also has character idioms, that is, combinations of two characters that are completely unanalyzable. To my knowledge, these don't occur in Egyptian (though, to be honest, I have only a fairly rudimentary knowledge of Egyptian and there might be some I don't know about.) Egyptian is probably more difficult to type set, since the orientation of the characters depends on the direction of writing, though I suppose that a simple rotation about the y-axis like this is not much of a problem with digital fonts. The fact that the symbols of Egyptian are not written in a linear sequence but are grouped in a space-filling fashion is also a complication. I think that the Japanese system is probably more complex in terms of structure and number of systems, while Egyptian is more complex typographically. Bill