Re: What's system attribute "__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING"?
Re: What's system attribute "__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING"?
- Subject: Re: What's system attribute "__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING"?
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 11:40:34 -0400
On Fri, 30 Aug 2002 12:11:03 -0400, From: "Arthur J. Knapp"
<email@hidden> noted,
>
The Japanese situation is interesting. Modern Japanese functionally
>
supports 4 different written scripts: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and
>
the western roman script. I would not want to have to work at a
>
Japanese newspaper. ;-)
Japanese isn't that bad, since the hiragana and katakana scripts are
syllabaries, with 50 characters each. (Not exactly, because some syllables are
no longer used, and there are some variants, like accent marks. But a very
finite number of characters.) And the hiragana and katakana scripts are
functionally very much like roman and italic fonts. So if you are writing
"McDonald's", you write it in katakana. You can do every thing you need with
hiragana and katakana--children's books are in hiragana alone, and telegrams in
katakana. Its like typing in 12-point all-caps Courier. But if you want the
equivalent of typesetting, you need kanji.
Modern Japanese has 2,000 "daily" kanji characters that every adult is expected
to know, plus those for personal and place names. And because each kanji may
represent an old Japanese word and also a newer Chinese-derived word of similar
meaning, there are sometimes little pronunciation-hint characters, written in
hiragana, under some kanji. (These hints are critical to good karaoke singing.
:-o )
Computerized kanji typesetting is an interesting process. They operator types
the syllables with a hiragana keyboard, and the computer figures out which kanji
character, if any, is to be used, based on context, grammar, and user
interaction. The typist often needs to pick from a menu, because Japanese has a
huge number of homophones. The languages has a lot of words from Chinese, but
their pronunciation lost the tonal "accents" of Chinese. For example, a
friend's daughter is named "Haruka". The kanji make it clear the name means
"spring flower", but "ka" could also mean "mosquito".
So what does this mean for AppleScripters? If you are writing a script for a
truly widespread audience, you should rely heavily on the OS for dealing with
text, language, and keyboard. The Apple folks have worried about these issues
for a long time. If you start interacting too closely with the keyboard, you'll
have to deal with upset Japanese girls whose names print as "spring mosquito."
--
Scott Norton (sukotsu noru-ton = "birdcage pig-rider")
Phone: +1-703-299-1656
DTI Associates, Inc. Fax: +1-703-706-0476
2920 South Glebe Road Internet: email@hidden
Arlington, VA 22206-2768 or email@hidden
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