Re: [URN] Re: URL internationalization!

Masataka -

On Thu, 20 Feb 1997, you wrote:

> > > Each language already has its own denotation system in basic 26
> > > Latin alphabets, most, if not all, of them are unrelated to IPA.

[Just for your reference, there are 26 characters in the Latin
alphabet. I Japanese, the word "alphabet" is sometimes used to
refer to a character from an alphabet, but in English, this is
plain wrong and confusing.]


> > Spec'd by whom?
> 
> In Japan, it's ministry of foreign affairs.
> 
> You should ask airline office.

Please don't assume that this is done in every country.
And it only applies to names. In the Japanese case, it
is also possible to change your transcription for your
passport. I know somebody whose name would be transcribed
"Maeda", but who got it changed to "Mayeda" because he
didn't want the "Mae" being pronounced like a goat's moan
by German speakers.


> > > Multi-language support is doable with ASCII only and is orthogonal
> > > to multi-script support.
> > 
> > ???
> 
> Let's see the following Japanese translation of my sentence above:
> 
> 	Maruchi ringaru sapohto ha asukii dakede dekirunode atte,
> 	maruchi sukuriputo sapohto toha chokkou suru gainen da.
> 
> which is a sentence of Japanese language with Latin script.

The official "spec" for writing Japanese text is under control
of the ministry of education. It is called Kunrei-s(h)iki.
The above would have to be changed to conform, in particular,
all the occurrences of "ch" would have to be changed to "t"
or "ty" depending on circumstances. The use of "h" for
vowel prolongation is also not standard. As far as I am
aware of, the exact way of splitting the text into words
was never specified.
As even you as a true specialist in "ASCII multilingual text
coding" can't get these things correct, how would the average
Japanese computer user?


> > Font management with ISO 2022 is intractable! 
> 
> Wrong. It is only that whether some font is available or not.
> 
> So is ISO 10646. Read RFC 1815.
> 
> And, it is usually the case that when someone does not have a font
> of some character, that person can't read the character, anyway.

I'm glad that you concede now (you claimed something different in
other mails) that with respect to rendering, ISO 10646 and ISO 2022
are at least on equal footing.


Regards,	Martin.