Re: [idn] Dots, and a path to working IDNs

[C C Magnus Gustavsson <mag@lysator.liu.se>]

On Wed, 30 May 2001 liana.ydisg@juno.com wrote:

> Allow me to comment on your UTF-8 as a long term solution.
> 
> Most people in the world using a limited number of basic phonetic symbols
> to
> communicate.  This point can be shown by looking through Unicode tables.
> Even for Chinese, it can be handled by 25 letters as the minimum.  We can
> 
> infer that the number of symbols in Latin alphabet is an optimum number 
> for majority people in the world.  

The number of consonants may be fine but the Latin vowals are at least
by far too few to represent the sounds of a large number of languages
(including English, btw).


> The most charllenge problem is dealing with Chinese symbols, there are 
> 100,000 on the rise and the often used ones are over 8,000(depending on
> who's 
> viewpoint this is.) each is cramed inside a square space.  If we can
> represent them 
> with the existing small set of phonetic symbols why should we bother with
> UTF-8?  
> IBM started 8-bits characters with international users in mind.  But that
> solution 
> was not effective and the industry  knows the reasons. 

I guess that I'm not part of "industry" then after all, because I sure
don't know neither that 8 bit characters are not effective nor the
reasons. Perhaps you could explain them to us?


> I can see supporting UTF-8, such that  we may have International
> Alphabet, Cyrillic,
>  Arabic with a larger keyboard for the user to take the full usefulness
> of 8-bits. 
> Chinese have been tried large keyboards, and a medium 10x10 keyboard, but
> 
> only the English 3x10 has survived.  Without significent improvement for
> the
>  users, who would dive into UTF-8 trouble?  

I'm sorry but I don't understand. What are you suggesting? That we
stick with ASCII and don't bother about anything else? Are you really
trying to say that you don't see any improvement with using anything
else than ASCII?

/Magnus