RE: Term Asian is not used properly on Computers and NET

[Marco Cimarosti]

Someone (clearly having Chinese roots) wrote me privately:

> > But, if by "East Asian" you mean "languages written with 
> Han ideographs",
> > you fall in another pitfall, because Mongolian, Russian, 
> Vietnamese and many
> 
> I don't think so, Mongolia is not in East Asia, it's in North Asia.
> 
> Russia is in Europe or North Asia.
> 
> Vietname is in South or East-South Asia.
> 
> So East Asian is a pretty good term for CJK.

Good point!

All geographic expressions involving cardinal points ("Far East", "Near
East", etc.) are biased in assuming *Europe* as the point of observation.

But if you are in China, Mongolia is clearly Northwards, o!

And Americans would call Japanese an "Occidental language" if it wasn't for
the fact that most of them have European roots.

When I was studying Chinese, our lecturer once told us: "Well, this school
is the 'Institute of Eastern Languages', right? So why are Western languages
such as Hindi and Arabic also taught here?".

_ Marco