fw@sunbim.UUCP (Francois Wautier) (05/05/89)
Hello everybody,
I posted a request about computers and Japanese on the net some weeks ago.
Thanks to all of you who answered. Since most of the people that replied
asked me to share what I found out, here follows a little summary. I will start
this summary by explaining what Japanese writting consists of, for those of you
who are not familiar with it. (Are there any ???)
The japanese language has two alphabetic systems (katakana and hiragana)
and one ideographic system (kanji)
Kanji characters represent an idea. For example,if you hear the sound "ji",
it can mean (among other things) "character" or "o'clock" . But
when writing it, the kanji character for "character" is different from
the one for "o'clock". There are about 4000 different kanji characters!
Hiragana and katakana are more like the English alphabetic system, that is
to one character correspond one sound. Hiragana is used to write japanese words
while katakana is used to write words coming from foreign languages (e.g. my
first name, Francois, will be written using katakana in a japanese text). There
are 48 characters in both katakana and hiragana.
There exist standards for japanese characters (like ASCII for English),
e.g. JIS-C6226 and JIS-C6220.
The japanese characters are coded on two bytes.
Obviously, it is impossible to have all the kanji, hiragana and katakana on
a single keyboard. Japanese keyboards only support hiragana and katakana
characters. To type a kanji, the user types the sound equivalent in hiragana,
the system will then display the various possible kanji and the user selects
the right one.
Most of the "kanjified" softwares seem to run under Unix and X. Unix has
been "kanjified" by AT&T Pacific Ltd (The company's name has changed a few
weeks ago and I don't remember the new one). It is a Unix System V.
If you want to know more about kanji and computers, here follow a list of
references.
Migrating VMS applications to the Japanese VMS environment
Burkley, R.E.
Digital Equipment Corp., Acton, MA, USA
Electro/88 Conference Record
Boston, MA, USA 10-12 May 1988
Publisher: Electron. Conventions Manage. Los Angeles, CA, USA
Western Periodicals, North Hollywood, CA, USA
A Chinese-English microcomputer system
Archer, N.P.; Chan, M.W.L.; Huang, S.J.; Liu, R.T.
Communications of the ACM vol.31, no.8, Aug. 1988, p.977-82.
Overview of GMW+Wnn system
Hagiya, M.; Hattori, T.; Morishima, A.; Nakajima, R.; Nilde, N.;
Okazaki, R.; Sakuragawa, T.; Suzuki, T.; Tsuiki, H.; Yuasa, T.
Res. Inst. for Math. Sci., Kyoto Univ., Japan
Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Conference on Computer Workstations
Santa Clara, CA, USA 7-10 March 1988
Publisher: IEEE Comput. Soc. Press. Washington, DC, USA
The JUNET environment
Murai, J.
Computer Centre, Tokyo Univ., Japan
EUUG UNIX Around the World. Proceedings of the Spring 1988 EUUG
Conference
London, UK 11-15 April 1988
Measurements of Kanjification: making English-speaking programs
Japanese-speaking
Kawazoe, H.; Ohba, M.
IBM Japan Ltd., Tokyo, Japan
Proceedings of COMPSAC 87. The Eleventh Annual International
Computer Software and Applications Conference
Tokyo, Japan 7-9 Oct. 1987
Kanji UNIX: Yunikkusu wa Nihongo o Hanasemasu (UNIX speaks
Japanese)
Jung, R.S.; Kalash, J.T.
UniSoft Syst., Berkeley, CA, USA
USENIX Association Summer Conference Proceedings, Atlanta 1986
Atlanta, GA, USA 9-13 June 1986
1986, p.209-22,
Integrated information processing system for Japanese word
processing and Kanji data processing
Abe, K.; Kawada, K.; Ito, K.
Electr. Commun. Labs., NTT, Tokyo, Japan
Rev. Electr. Commun. Lab. (Japan)
vol.32, no.5, Sept. 1984
Kanjification and simple extensions of Software through Pictures
Y. Masatani, H. Kuroki, S. Isoda
NTT Software Laboratories
Proceedings of the Second Annual IDE User Group Meeting,
Interactive Development Environment
San Francisco, March 1989.
That's all for the moment. If I find some other references, I'll let you know.
So long
Francois
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Francois Wautier | I like trafic lights (ter)
BIM | No matter where they've been
Kwikstraat 4, |
B-3078 Everberg | I like trafic lights (ter)
Belgium (Europe) | But only when they're green
|
Tel: +32-(0)2-759 59 25 | (from a Monty Python's song)
Mail: fw@sunbim.be |
UUCP.mcvax!prlb2!sunbim!fw
Fax: +32-(0)2-759 47 95
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