Hi, I think we must never talk about script reforms here, because we don't have political power to achieve them. Also, needed labor for i18n developers to supporting bidi or other complex scripts is *much* less than needed cost for such script reforms. Why people here who are interested in i18n cannot respect cultures in the world as such? I agree that BiDi support in terminal is a heavy work. However, it is possible. It is possible with much much less cost than script reform to have a certain level of BiDi support like Arab Windows/DOS and FriBidi, though I don't know how satisfying these implementations are for native speakers. Even if we don't have enough skill or time to implement BiDi support, we must not say "BiDi should not be supported". We should say "Sorry, I don't have enough skill/time to implement it".
At Tue, 12 Feb 2002 14:12:00 -0700, Weldon Whipple wrote: > Prior to World War II, Japanese horizontal writing went from right to > left. After the war it changed to left-to-right. Yes. However, I don't know how many years they took. Anyway, we lost the War and the language reform was one of requests from The Occupation Forces. > (Of course, many [most?] Japanese books still go vertically, with the > front of a book at the back--from an English perspective.) The Japanese > don't have a real hangup with left-to-right versus right-to-left. I've > noticed that on buses and trucks, writing often goes from the front of > the vehicle to the back, so that on the left of the vehicle it is > L-to-R, and on the right of the vehicle it is R-to-L. Vertical writing is widely used. Go to Japanese bookstore and you will find more than half Japanese books are written vertically. (Generally speaking, most books, newspapers, and magazines whose topics are other than science, enginnering, and mathematics are written vertically. English textbook is horizonal. :-) > On my most recent trip to Japan, I noticed that signs for bathrooms were > invariably written "Toilet" (Romanized), rather than in katakana (and > rather than using O-te-arai [in kanji and hiragana], like they did 34 > years ago when I first went to Japan. Usage of such "Toilet" (Romanized) is only for design purpose. Though such usage is widely used, they are still not a normal Japanese language. > I doubt that if Japanese will ever completely abandon kanji, hiragana, > and katakana, but the language definitely uses more romanized words > today than it did 34 years ago ... I cannot imagine that, though there are few scholers who strongly insist abandoning kanji (using hiragana) or abandoning all of kanji, hiragana, and katakana (using Latin script). Such scholers are today completely ignored in major Japanese language. I read somewhere an interview of such scholers. The interviewer noted that even such scholers used kanji for interview purpose. It is apparent that such scholers are losing their places. --- Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/ "Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/ _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
