Re: [minutes] Internationalization telecon 2019-02-07

The same researcher published
https://ci.nii.ac.jp/els/contents110007176221.pdf?id=ART0009140938
and a series of articles
https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/report/KAKENHI-PROJECT-10610413/106104132001kenkyu_seika_hokoku_gaiyo/

Sorry, all of them are written in Japanese.

His research looks very interesting. He argues that there was
no horizontal writing in pre-modern Japan.   He provides three
reasons to believe that what looks like a right-to-left horizontal
writing is "actually vertical text with 1 character per column".

Regards,
Makoto

2019年2月14日(木) 8:21 MURATA Makoto <eb2m-mrt@asahi-net.or.jp>:

> I think that we should check 横書き登場―日本語表記の近代 (岩波新書 新赤版 (863)).
> It appears to be very valuable.  I do not have time today, but it is
> available
> in the library of Keio SFC.
>
> Regards,
> Makoto
>
> 2019年2月13日(水) 22:57 r12a <ishida@w3.org>:
>
>> hi Martin,
>>
>> On 13/02/2019 10:57, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>> > Hello Richard, others,
>> >
>> > On 2019/02/08 00:37, r12a wrote:
>> >> https://www.w3.org/2019/02/07-i18n-minutes.html
>> >
>> >>      richard: actually vertical text with 1 character per column is
>> >>      really an urban myth
>> >
>> > I'm not sure about this. When you see 門生羅 (and not 羅生門, as it would be
>> > with LTR) at the top of a gate, the easiest way to explain why the
>> > characters are placed the way they are is that whoever wanted to write
>> > them was used to writing vertical lines (i.e. columns), with the columns
>> > going from right to left, but only was able to fit one character per
>> > 'line' (i.e. column).
>> >
>> > Of course, this was done rather implicitly and without calling each
>> > character a column. And we cannot go back to the people who wrote the
>> > name of a door on the top of a door in ancient times, but it's the best
>> > explanation we have so far. If you have a better one, I'd like to hear
>> > about it.
>>
>>
>> There's a discussion related to this at
>> https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2754 which points to or shows
>> examples of text that is multiline, but written RTL.  See also the
>> article at https://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/right-to-left.html which talks
>> about Meiji era explorations related to inline character direction.
>>
>> If you look at old japanese postage stamps, the text tends to be written
>> on a curved path, which also feels to me at least unlike single
>> character columns.
>>
>>
>> >>      ... it's nonsensical
>> >
>> > It may be nonsensical (or not) as an approach to how to format it with
>> > CSS. It may also not apply to more 'modern' Chinese examples, in
>> > particular from Taiwan, where I think multiple-line RTL headings can
>> > also appear.
>>
>> My main concern is that i keep hearing from people who are suggesting
>> that RTL chinese and japanese should be authored in HTML by using
>> writing-modes and limiting the column height to one character.  Apart
>> from the fact that that is like trying to crack an egg with a hammer, it
>> doesn't actually work for the multiline text i mentioned above.
>>
>> People may or may not think of certain items of horizontal RTL text as
>> single character columns, but i don't think that's a good way to author
>> the text.
>>
>> hth clarify a little the (probably too) brief minutes.
>>
>> ri
>>
>>
>
>
>

-- 

Praying for the victims of the Japan Tohoku earthquake

Makoto