From: mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Language tagging
Date: 7 Jan 93 13:09:38 GMT
Organization: Tokyo Institute of Technology

In article <TT.93Jan7085019@tarzan.jyu.fi>
	tt@tarzan.jyu.fi (Tapani Tarvainen) writes:

>>Now, i think everybody agrees that the "ultimate encoding" is
>>the one which provides the complete information about which
>>language is used -- it sovles all the problems.
>
>While such an encoding might be called "ultimate",

Agreed. As the proposal is much more rational than 10646 and can not
be compatible with 10646, let's throw away 10646/Unicode and make the
UCS (Ultimate coded Character Set).

>it wouldn't solve
>all problems.  In particular, the encoding mustn't force one to
>provide information that's irrelevant or not available.

There should be one language code: wild card.

If the language distiction information is not available, we should
assign wild card code to the character, which will match with
characters of any language.

>>2) there is an *algorithm* for converting from upper case to lower case
>>   and vice versa.
>
>>   This property is extremely useful
>
>Agreed.  It is also very difficult to do completely for all languages
>without knowing the language.  E.g., in some languages several lower
>case characters may map to same upper case character.  Perhaps it
>would be sufficient to have a case-insensitive comparison algorithm?

Agreed.

>A pure locale-system clearly won't do in multilingual environments.
>Nonetheless some things are, IMHO, best handled with locales.

Agreed.

>However, there's another issue with sorting where your proposal is
>disastrous:  A single list of names may need to be sorted differently
>on different occasions depending on the target language.  If Spanish
>ll and ch are considered individual characters, and German and Finnish
>a-umlaut as distinct characters, this means that a Finnish reader must
>know the language a name originated in in order to find it.

Are 'll' and 'ch' considered individual characers having distinct code
points? Or are 'l', 'l', 'c' and 'h'?

I think latter better.

>It is
>impossible to explain to a layman that M"oller and M"oller are
>different names and in different place in the directory because one is
>German and the other Swedish.

In this case, of course, language distinction should be the last key
used for sorting,
shouldn't it?

>Even worse, the problem isn't limited to sorting:  E.g., assume you
>want to search a database for the works of one Mr. M"oller without
>knowing where he comes from.  Or when entering a reference you have
>on paper to a database: how do you know which "o to type?

I think the problem can be solved by introducing new notation of
regular expressions.

For example, let '[[A]]' represent all latin alphabet 'A's regardless of its
language, and let '[[[a]]]' represent all variants of latin alphabet 'A's
such as "A with ring above".

Then, if you want to search Mr. M"oller of any nationality, use the
following pattern

		[[M]][["o]][[l]][[l]][[e]][[r]]

or just use characters of wild card nationality.

>>5) typographical-quality fonts often differentiate between
>>   "similar" glyhps reproducible on lower-resolution devices.

It should be stressed that corresponding characters in China and Japan
are differnt even on high resolution CRTs.

>>The idea is to leave ALL language specifics at the point of input
>>where the language is supposedly known.

How many, do you think, nationality distinction is necessary for
a given single character?

It seems to me that, for Han characters, we need 5 or so and it could
be represented with 3 bits.

						Masataka Ohta