🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1jpj9sINNlie@flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU> crowl@jade.CS.ORST.EDU (Lawrence Crowl) writes:
(removed all other attributions).
 > >>The question I was asking was "can you _identify_ a han/kanji character
 > >>based on a sequence of radicals"
 > >
 > >No, you can't. Radicals are for indexing only. The rest of the character
 > >has its own complex shape.
 > 
 > If you can use radicals for indexing, then you can use them to identify
 > characters.  The process of identifying a character need not be able
 > to, by itself, generate an acceptable image.
How come?  I can use the base letter A for indexing, it can not be used to
identify the actual letter (which may have one or more diacritics floating
around).  (Sorry you nordic people that I make a diacritic from the ring!)
 > 
 > An encoding every variant of every character ever written is not?  At
 > 214 radicals, we can represent a radical in eight bits, and a character
 > in 8*(average number of radicals per character).  Your non-unified
 > approach would require roughly eighteen bits per character.
As I understand it each character has only one radical.  (I learned that
a character consists of a radical plus possibly additional strokes.)  You
have the misunderstanding that a character is composed of a number of
radicals.  (BTW, this is true of the Korean Hangul, but that is actually
an alphabetic script, each base symbol represents a sound.)
 > 
...
 > Unique in what sense?  Examples?
Unique in the sense that they do not contain radicals.

(And excuses to you Japanese, Chinese and Korean people for the inaccuracies
I wrote.)
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj  amsterdam, nederland
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn  amsterdam, nederland; e-mail: dik@cwi.nl