Excuse me, this mail might be so off-topic :-)


From: Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>
Subject: Re: Japanese with wscons? 
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 00:10:03 -0700
Message-ID: <200101180710.f0I7A4s43741@harmony.village.org>

> In message <G72IJH.37t@tac.nyc.ny.us> Christos Zoulas writes:
> :     IMHO Japanese users are much pickier than the rest.

Yes, I'm sure that it's true. :-)
I think this is a lingual characteristic of Japanese.


> While others have explained this here, maybe an western analogy might
> be best.

Ok.  Plainly speaking, a ideographic character normally corresponds
with a word of Latin languages.


> If you saw a display with all the 's' characters drawn backwards like
> a child might draw them, you wouldn't think it is a professional
> system.  This despite the fact that you could easily understand what
> was intended.  This is analogous to what happens with the glyphs in
> the wrong fonts.
> 
> Another anology would be if someone were to write with many
> mispellings or use homonyms in place of the write words.  Sure, you'd
> know what was supposed to be there, but it would be wrong.

Other analogies:
  1. "although" and "though" are similar, but these are normally
     distinguished.
  2. "Stephen" and "Steven" have the same pronunciation in English,
     but if the name of a Mr. Stephen were spelled "Steven",
     he might get angry :-)
     Or, if this were a name of bank account, it might cause
     serious problem to his property.

These differences of words in Latin languages can basically apply to
the differences of glyphs in ideographic languages.


--
Takuya SHIOZAKI