Re: [Evolution-hackers] How the Contact Card classfied by alphabets?

[Dan Winship <danw ximian com>]

On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 07:27, Martin Grimme wrote:
> Am Fr, den 30.01.2004 schrieb Yong Sun um 13:01:
> > But the A-Z button not fully valid for Chinese name, some characters
> > could be listed correctly according to their PINYIN, yet for other
> > characters, they were put to "others" button. 
> 
> When you look at the GNOME unicode character map, you can see that
> there is information about the PINYIN available for each Chinese
> character. Evo could use the same table to find out how to map Hanzi
> characters to latin letters.
> 
> This would work well for Mandarin, where a character usually has one
> pronunciation and it's quite clear how to pronounce a given name.
> But I see a problem with Japanese, where characters have different
> pronunciations and it's not always clear how to pronounce a given name.

Not to mention Cantonese and the various other Chinese dialects, which
would give different spellings for lots of characters.

Perhaps there could be a field for "Romanized name". Or more
generically, just allow the name to be entered in multiple scripts.
(Presumably Russian speakers would want a "Cyrillicized" form of the
Chinese name. Europeans could include both "correct" and "ASCII-only"
spellings of their name. Japanese people with obscure last names could
include a kana representation of it in addition to the kanji. Etc, etc.)
That seems like the sort of thing that would be generically useful as an
extension to vCard though. (An electronic parallel to the two-sided
bilingual business card.)

> Maybe Evo should support a radical based addressbook for languages with
> Chinese characters. There could be a switch for displaying the radical
> buttons next to the letter buttons and whoever wants to deal with
> Chinese characters enables the additional buttons.

I agree that would be a radical interface, but probably not in the same
sense you meant. :-)

> Such an additional button bar could be made available for several other
> writing systems as well, e.g. Hangul, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Kyrill, ...

As Toshok noted, we tried to support using alternative alphabets, just
not non-alphabetic writing systems. And what was there also didn't work
well for anyone whose contacts weren't heavily biased toward their local
alphabet.

There might be some better interface we could come up with though. The
buttons were modeled after the tabs on physical address books. How do
people organize their (non-electronic) address books in China and Japan?

-- Dan