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by stevewillows 4641 days ago
That's fascinating!

I can only imagine both the pressure and push back to 'get it right' from academics. Not only for their own language, but in a competitive sense either other counties.

Great reply!

1 comments

There's not much pressure. I don't think anyone reasonably expects the Unicode consortium to fix the problems with Han Unification at all - mainly because Unicode is already too pervasive, and the cost to update existing technology to make it compatible would be too big.

There's specialized software, encodings and fonts that can be downloaded for writing traditional characters such as Mojikyo (http://www.mojikyo.org/PWU8N/index.php), but any text is basically incompatible with other software, including the web, except via converting them to images.

It's unlikely this will change. Technological progress is more important to most people, and anything not in Unicode will eventually be lost in time, just like spoken languages disappear every year as state educations force a standardized language on people.

Mojikyo! That's the one. Their site has changed a lot since I last saw it (probably ~5 years back).

On the disappearance meme, I would posit that "writing almost never dies out anymore, it just gets progressively more obscure".

On the spoken languages meme, I also volunteer on occasion for the World Oral Literature Project (Cambridge/Yale) @ http://oralliterature.org/ .. I've also been contemplating heading up to Assam in India, maybe Bhutan and Nepal to do what little recording I can manage.