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From: fw@sunbim.UUCP (Francois Wautier)
Newsgroups: sci.lang.japan,comp.misc
Subject: Japanese language and computers
Keywords: Kanji Japanese Unix
Message-ID: <494@sunbim.UUCP>
Date: 5 May 89 09:12:06 GMT
Organization: BIM, Everberg Belgium
Lines: 122


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

---------------------------------------------------------------
Francois Wautier 		|   I like trafic lights  (ter)
BIM				|   No matter where they've been
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