Marketing wizardry & handling of far-east languages.

[Bill Poser]

In article <2262 at munnari.oz.au> ok at cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) writes:
>At least the Egyptian Hieratic script is
>dead (though from what I hear the Japanese system is nearly as complex).

Actually, the Japanese system is arguably more complex than the various
Egyptian scripts (hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic). The number of
characters is larger. Egyptian used only a few hundred, whereas basic modern
Japanese is about 3000 and lots more are possible. Japanese also presents
the difficulty that a single character typically has two classes of
readings, one consisting of native words, one consisting of loans from Chinese.
Japanese also has character idioms, that is, combinations of two characters
that are completely unanalyzable. To my knowledge, these don't occur in
Egyptian (though, to be honest, I have only a fairly rudimentary knowledge
of Egyptian and there might be some I don't know about.) Egyptian is
probably more difficult to type set, since the orientation of the characters
depends on the direction of writing, though I suppose that a simple rotation
about the y-axis like this is not much of a problem with digital fonts.
The fact that the symbols of Egyptian are not written in a linear sequence
but are grouped in a space-filling fashion is also a complication.
I think that the Japanese system is probably more complex in terms of
structure and number of systems, while Egyptian is more complex
typographically.

						Bill