Re: developers Japanese and Chinese names' original characters

[Glenn Maynard <g_deb@zewt.org>]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 07:55:46PM -0400, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > The best I can do right now is e.g. grep /usr/share/edict/enamdict to guess
> > from the romanization.
> [snip]
> 
> That would be unreliable at best. Chinese names from different regions are
> romanized using incompatible schemes, sometimes even *inconsistent*
> schemes.  Only mainland Chinese use a consistent scheme (Pinyin).

More importantly (because it's not fixable), you can't tell what characters
are used for a name from a phonetic representation, at least with Japanese.

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/jpnE9geKpCsE4D4nmtB.html

"In general, there is only one kanji combination for a surname and
Japanese can easily guess it. Even if I write my surname as タカスギ,
people would know it is actually 高杉. However, 親知 and シンジ are
different because there are many possibilities of kanji for given
names." (TAKASUGI Shinji)

I'd recommend against any automatic lookup scheme; it's probably better
to use a romanized name than to use the wrong kanji.

I do think having a list of native DD names would be novel, at least,
but it would have to be manually maintained.

-- 
Glenn Maynard