Re: Comprehensive East-Asian support

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Mon, Jan 31, 2000 at 10:02:45AM +0800, Steve Underwood wrote:

> > > options for left-to-right and right-to-left (I'm not sure if Japanese is
> > > ever written right-to-left, now or in the past).
> >
> > Only for one line texts. It is considered as vertical writting with columns
> > of one char length.
> 
> Does this imply that Japanese text is often written with a right-to-left title
> line, and a vertical body below it?

No.:)
I only said that one line right to left  isn't considered as right to left
but as vertical of one char long columns.
The only things were I saw that style printed on paper was on old (pre-war)
banknotes and the stuff to put on the enveloppes to pay for postage (I don't
remember the name; the things that philatellists love).

Otherwise it is used on fronts of some monuments, and on vehicles sides
(so that each side of the vehicle is symmetric in writing to the other)


Well, it sure can be used like that; and maybe it is/had been; simply I never
saw it, but on the other hand I didn't read much japanese newspapers either.

> [OT] Though the precise usage of Hanzi and Kanji differ, they are usually not
> too far apart. When I questioned the name Pango, some people responsed that
> U+82F1 U+6587, which means written English in Chinese means English literature
> in Japanese. It loosely does in Chinese too, though its not how you would
> normally express English literature. U+6587 has a sense of literature and
> culture - hence it becomes part of a lot of Chinese names. So, the meanings are
> in the same ballpark, and I can often get the gish of a piece of Japanese if it
> is mostly Kanji.

Similar small (and sometimes huge) drifts in meaning can be observed with
the aparented european languages too.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.ping.be/~pin19314/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975