Unicode Unification Objections

[Fredrik Lundh]

Dennis E. Hamilton <infonuovo at email.com> wrote:
> Consider the following.  In Japanese texts, when a borrowed or employed
> Korean word is used, a desired practice is to render the Korean
> characters as different, even though some or all of them involve "the
> same character" common to both languages.  However, the iconography (or
> calligraphy) is commonly different.  This loses the ability to
> distinguish the linguistic use of the character, forcing material to be
> font-distinguished some how (e.g., give me the ones that look Korean,
> not the ones that look Japanese).  This means that the distinction can't
> be preserved in simple text.

the distinction cannot be preserved in a naked unicode character
stream, but it's done that way on purpose.  you cannot really handle
text strings correctly (rendering, sorting, comparing, etc) unless you
have language and locale information.

this is as true for unicode as it is for latin 1 or any other multilingual
character set.  after all, the "western culture" isn't really as homo-
geneous as you americans seem to think ;-)

</F>