AW: Corpora: non-alphabetic language databases

[Thomas Schmidt]

The unicode standard is indeed a promising solution for representing 
non-alphabetic characters of any kind. Concerning the original question: I 
don't know much about sign languages, but I wouldn't be surprised if the 
unicode consortium has taken or will take these into account.If they don't, 
the design of the unicode standard leaves room for user-defined symbols, so 
it should be possible, for instance, to code alphabetic and sign language 
symbols within one document.
The unicode homepage is on

	http://www.unicode.org/

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von:	Simon G. J. Smith [SMTP:smithsgj at eee.bham.ac.uk]
Gesendet am:	Donnerstag, 30. November 2000 12:34
An:	corpora at hd.uib.no
Betreff:	Re: Corpora: non-alphabetic language databases


Paula

Have a look at www.chinesecomputing.com

Are you a student of one of these languages? Take a look at a website from 
one of the countries, without character-reading software running, and you 
will see that each character is represented by two ASCII characters - 
usually obscure things like ^ or ` and others that are not on the qwerty 
keyboard at all.

My understanding is this: order of database entry is not based on any 
phonetic system, nor on any arrangement of radicals or character 
components, but on a standard (for Chinese, usually one of Big-5 or GB 
(Guo-Biao)) which maps each character on to an arbitrary pair of ASCII 
characters. With the advent of the Unicode standard, a one-to-one mapping 
is also now possible, but implementations are rare.

I'm not an expert: perhaps there's one around who would care to add their 
comments?