Re: Pango Status Report, 14 Jan 2000

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Steve Underwood <steveu@coppice.org> writes:

> Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> > [...]
> 
> > The name is
> >
> >    Greek "Pan" / U03A0 U03B1 U03BD / All
> >      +
> >    Japanese "Go" (Mandarin Yu3, Yu4) / U8A9E / Language
> 
> Maybe Japanese uses this character in a looser way than Chinese, but in
> Chinese it specifically means spoken language. The character U+6587 means
> written language. For example, U+82F1 U_8A9E means spoken English, and
> U+82F1 U+6587 means written English (or more generally all forms of
> English).

Although other people on this list could answer better, I don't
believe this distinction exists in Japanese. 

U6587, in Japanese, means something more like "literature" (though it
is generally used in compounds such as bunji - literature, or bunpou,
grammer.)

It's unfortunate that the written form of the name with the Han
character doesn't work in Chinese, but I'd rather not change the name
at this point and we'll generally just be using the romanized
version anyways, which can be considered just an opaque name.

Regards,
                                        Owen

(If somebody has a brilliant suggestion for a name, feel free to speak
up anyways. Raph and I worked on it for quite a while and didn't come
up with anything we liked better.)