🚀 go-pugleaf

<Rain-iitaa, tabenasai>

In article <piring.51> lambert@cwi.nl (Lambert Meertens) writes:
>
>In article <479@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>) This, of course, makes it even more amazing that they have been so succesful
>) in the world community. It seems likely to me, though, that at some point
>) they're going to have to break down and drop Kanji for professional use.
>
>There seems to be a good reason for not doing this: after romanization,
>words written differently in Kanji may become the same.  Although

A fairly important breakthrough was made in the
area of Japanese word processing some years ago when it was realized
that characters could be translated from a phonetic alphabet to Kanji
after entering the word.  Japanese word processors now allow the
user to enter a word as one or more hiragana (one of the phonetic
alphabets with only about 55 basic characters), then at the touch of a
key, cycle through the Kanji corresponding to that pronunciation,
starting with the most commonly used.  The user stops when the desired
Kanji appears, then continues with the next word. 

I do not know how the final Kanji is actually stored, but it could
conceivably be stored as the sequence of hiragana followed by some
special index telling which "view" of that sequence should be used
when displaying the character.  This would seem to take care of some
of the problems discussed in this group.  It could cause problems if
the "reference" dictionary (conversion tables from kana to Kanji)
changed, but I don't think this is likely to happen often.  A standard
set of reference tables would need to be adopted (if it hasn't already
been) if this were to actually be used as a data interchange format.

A Chinese word processor would be a different story, however, since
I do not believe Chinese has a phonetic alphabet like Japanese's
hiragana and katakana.

More info about a specific Japanese word processor is available to us
English-only readers by reading a review of one for the Mac a year or
so ago (I don't remember exactly which magazine it was in).

Disclaimer:  I know only a little nihongo, but my wife is a native
Japanese, and often uses a Japanese word processor made by Fujitsu.
-- 
Dave DiNucci                    UUCP:  ..ucbvax!tektronix!ogcvax!dinucci
Oregon Graduate Center          CSNET: dinucci@Oregon-Grad.csnet
Beaverton, Oregon