I am no expert, but I took two years of Chinese. I think my Chinese
teacher said that the total number of Chinese characters is several
hundred thousand. On the other hand you can read a newspaper knowing
only about a thousand. The large majority of possible characters are
used very infrequently, and in many cases only in ancient documents.
But, he said, (with what I took to be bitter irony) there are
uniformities in the shape and meaning of the characters, without which
the written language would become unwieldy.
I think this means that you can use a fixed width 16 bit
representation for most daily correspondence, but you will still need
escape codes and special purpose fonts for ancient Chinese, for the
artist formerly known as Prince, and for logos and other graphics that
are embeded in text.
--
--Keith
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