Re: status: EDUML v0.6

[Wil Langford <wil@langford.net>]

On Tue, 29 Dec 1998 rnd@sampo.karelia.ru wrote:

>I am not sure if I understood. I always thought that  one  word
>is almost always one 'picture' in Chinese... Probably, this  is
>just a matter of charset... (Will EDUML support Unicode?)

<grain-of-salt reason="I only took 2 weeks of Chinese">

Chinese ideograms are each roughly equivalent to one syllable in a
European language. Pretend that the "E" and "W" squares below are really
the (much better looking) ideograms for east and west in Chinese:

	EEE       	WWW
	EEE = east	WWW = west
	EEE    	  	WWW

Separately, the ideograms (or spoken syllables) mean east and west.
Together (the equivalent of the written eastwest or spoken "eastwest" in
English,) they mean "thing" (if I understood Barret Dolph correctly):

	EEE WWW
	EEE WWW = thing
	EEE WWW

Each combination of several ideogram/syllables often means something
completely unrelated to the individual parts.

Keep that in mind before you ask me why I dropped that class...  :)

</grain-of-salt>

>But is it absolutly necessary to have tags in native languages?
>Can't the frontend handle them transparently?

I agree here.  Perhaps the "dictionary" suggested by Duane Morin could be
something used primarily by the front end coders, who will need to work
more with internationalization anyway.

I believe that it was Roman Suzi who pointed out that when he translated
the Netscape menus and dialogs into Russian, he had a hard time using it.
We may want to keep that in mind before we get into a situation where a
programmer from Germany writes in to say that he is having trouble with
the "Aufwand" tag, and few know that he is talking about the "cost" tag
without looking it up.

Wil

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