I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
“Whatever path we take, it’s imperative that the writing system of the 21st century be driven by the needs of the people using it. In the end, a non-native speaker – even one who is fluent in the language – cannot truly speak on behalf the monolingual, native speaker.”<p>Not sure how the author can simultaneously say this, while criticizing the CJK unification, which makes total sense, and has never been a point of contention in the communities concerned with it.<p>I regularly work with both Chinese and Japanese texts, and have studied Japanese language for more than five years; more than not opposing CJK unification, I benefit from it greatly. It means that I can search for the same character(yes, the same, I said it) and get results in Japanese, Chinese, and sometimes Korean context without having to consult some sort of unicode etymology resource.<p>There should not be three codepoints for 中, 日, 力, and most other characters. The simplified and specific post-han forms have their own codepoints anyway, so there is(to my eyes at least) no value in fragmenting instances of the same character.