- From: by way of <bcaplan@i18n.com>
- Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 17:18:19 +0900
- To: www-international@w3.org
Well, I am willing to stand corrected, especially by someone as esteemed and Martin J. Duerst. See what happens when I write early in the morning w/ o checking my old Japanese books? Anyway, now I wonder if the correct answer is somewhere in-between (still haven't looked at the old books). Maybe some of the kana were available in half-width values but not all? For instance, when writing "shi-(little) ya for "sha" (=person). Only a few kana would fall into this category. Someone wiser than me can say if that category has a name, but there are clearly half-width and full-width versions of the kana in question. Kana have changed in usage during the lifetime of people still alive - there are some that are no longer used. So maybe it is possible that even the 1/2 width kana I am describing are a relatively modern usage. Martin? I definitely agree w/ Martin's comments about Latin characters in Japanese. I also agree that there was hardware that solved the character problem by implementing hankaku katakana to write Japanese, and the decision to do so means job security for me now, ~40 years later. Barry At 12:01 PM 2/16/00 +0900, Martin J. Duerst wrote: >At 10:41 00/02/15 -0500, Barry Caplan wrote: > > At 04:49 PM 2/15/00 +0900, Stuart Woodward wrote: > > > >This is a holdover > > >from the hardware word processor world which could only print in two > sizes. > > > > This is not correct. Normal Japanese is written this way and has been for > > hundreds, maybe almost a thousand years. It has nothing to do with > computers. > >This is definitely not correct. Half-width Kana was introduced at >the start of computerization, where it was too expensive to deal >with Kanji. Before that, it would be extremely surprised if there >were any half-width kana. Latin letters were definitely not used >for hundreds of years (except maybe in a dictionary or two and >a few other works around 1600), and in print, usually proportional >type is used. > > >Regards, Martin. > > >#-#-# Martin J. Du"rst, World Wide Web Consortium >#-#-# mailto:duerst@w3.org http://www.w3.org
Received on Wednesday, 16 February 2000 04:19:22 UTC