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Hi! On 19 Oct , Keith Wright wrote: >>>Unicode will not be able to represent all of Hanzi/Kanji/Hanza (the >>>ideographs). The news coming from the Taiwanese committees let us >>>assume they have another 30,000 ideographs and more to come. >> >>This is insane. I'm going to go become a gardener. >> > > I am no expert, but I took two years of Chinese. I think my Chinese > teacher said that the total number of Chinese characters is several > hundred thousand. On the other hand you can read a newspaper knowing > only about a thousand. The large majority of possible characters are > used very infrequently, and in many cases only in ancient documents. > But, he said, (with what I took to be bitter irony) there are > uniformities in the shape and meaning of the characters, without which > the written language would become unwieldy. > > I think this means that you can use a fixed width 16 bit > representation for most daily correspondence, but you will still need > escape codes and special purpose fonts for ancient Chinese, for the > artist formerly known as Prince, and for logos and other graphics that > are embeded in text. > Well, I always thought that characters were "invented" to allow for a simple encoding of words. In this sense "chinese characters" are IMHO no characters at all because they encode whole words by themself (at least that's what I think). So I would expect to use more than one character to represent a "chinese character". OK, this is just a philosophical point of view and does not help to solve the technical problems. Martin Kuball