Are East Asian script languages considered to be complex script languages?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/07/24 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/07/24/10332817.aspx


The question asked by someone internally was:

Are East Asian script languages considered to be complex script languages?

Well, I suppose it would depend on both one's definition of "East Asian script languages" and "complex script languages", really.

If I use the Microsoft definition of Complex then I am only thinking of ones that require special handling when rendered by Uniscribe.

And if I use the general Microsoft definition of East Asian to not include South Asian or Southeast Asian, then I cannot say YES on the basis of Thai or Vietnamese.

However, one has to consider:

and then say that the answer is YES unless you plan to rephrase your question. :-)

Usually people asking the question will rephrase at that point, as they were often thinking only on CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) when they asked, but I remind them of old Hangul, which is obviously quite Korean. And even while a Korean colleague noted it wasn't a mainstream scenario, it was also noted to be something even high school kids knew about and knew.

So the answer is still YES unless the question is reframed yet again!

 


no comments

Please consider a donation to keep this archive running, maintained and free of advertising.
Donate €20 or more to receive an offline copy of the whole archive including all images.

go to newer or older post, or back to index or month or day