Re: Red Hat 8 now uses UTF-8 by default for all non-CJK users

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@xxxxxxxxx>]

Followup to:  <3E15588B.9000608@xxxxxxxxxx>
By author:    Ulrich Drepper <drepper@xxxxxxxxxx>
In newsgroup: linux.utf8
> 
> That's no valid comparison.
> 
> The question is whether I, who has almost no knowledge of Kanji and
> Chinese, would be able to recognize the similarities easier than it is
> possible for you to decipher fraktur.
> 
> I can read and write fraktur without any problems even though I had no
> formal education in doing this.  It's something you pick up.  In the
> same way a C or J or K speaker will perhaps pick up some knowledge which
> makes it easy/easier to read the [JK], [CK], or [CJ] glyphs
> respectively.  I cannot say whether this is true or not.
> 

As a beginning Japanese language student, I think I'm roughly in your
target group here.  The answer, for me, is that I can read Kanji in a
Chinese font without too much problems, *except* for certain
characters, which are a bit like "I don't know if X is supposed to be
equivalent to Y" -- unlike the Latin alphabet, you can't use the
process of elimination.  U+9234 is a good example of that; the lower
right quadrant looks quite different (and there is compatibility
character, U+F9B1, which is supposed to be Korean but looks equivalent
to Japanese to me.)  I have asked before and been informed people more
proficient in Japanese have no problem recognizing the characters as
variants, though.

	-hpa


P.S. Anyone happens to know what the thing the Unihan database calls
the "Z-Variant" is supposed to be?  U+9234 and U+F9B1 are supposed to
be Z-Variants, but I can't find any explanation of the term
anywhere... see:

http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=9234&useutf8=true
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