On Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 01:22:32AM +0100, Simon Cozens wrote:
> I'd say it was about as useful as providing a regexp option to translate
> the search term into French and try that instead.[1] Handy, possibly.
> Essential? No. Something that should be part of the core? I'll leave
> that for you to decide.
I believe that my initial analogy is more accurate than yours. The
ability to match Hiragana as Katakana and vice-versa is almost
identical conceptually to the ability to perform case insensitive
matches on English text.
> What next, you want to maybe add Japanese and Chinese readings for all
> the kanji and convert between them too? That would be *considerably*
> more useful. :)
>
> [1] katakana signifies "The following text is not in Japanese", except
> when it doesn't.
This is literally accurate, but completely content-free. The
variety of ways in which Hiragana and Katakana are be used in
Japanese are as disparate as the ways in which italic and non-italic
characters are used in English.
Katakana is frequently used to write words with additional emphasis,
to convey the impression of a sentence being spoken with an accent,
to write the on-youmi of a Kanji, to write foreign loan words, and to
write onomatopoeia. (This is not a complete list.)
- Damien
