In Nomine - The Lotus Land

So I was updating my input method editors (IME) from the default in Windows x64 (IME 2002) to the ones provided by Office 2007’s language packs. As explained in a previous post of mine you can install the proofing tools and input by passing LAUNCHEDBYSETUPEXE=1 to the execution of the MSI. Now, on my Windows x64 I installed the IME by installing the IME64.MSI with this added variable. The weird thing was that some applications worked flawlessly and yet others showed me the wrong number of icons or no icons at all! It turns out that these applications are 32-bits applications and need to have the 32-bits IME installed as well. So next to installing IME64.MSI of the language you want to install, you will also have to install IME32.MSI. Only after doing this will you notice the applications working as you want them.

Thinking back on it, it makes perfect sense, but while you are in the middle of working with it you keep wondering: “why?”

So I have been toying with the proofing tools and input method editors (IME) from Office 2007. The issue with the single language packs is that you cannot just group the entire stuff together.

Also trying to run the MSIs from the individual directories for the proofing tools or the IMEs greets you with an ‘Error 1713′. On the other hand, if you run the MSI from the command prompt and passing along LAUNCHEDBYSETUPEXE=1 as an argument it will install. Curious.

Here in Rotterdam we have a Chinese supermarket called in Dutch phonetic Cantonese ‘Wah Nam Hong’, which in Jyutping (waa4 naam4 hong4) stands for the hanzi 華南行. Literally translated 華南 stands for South China and matches the obvious Cantonese heritage. The 行 stands for a profession or business line.

What is interesting to me is that in Japanese (日本語) you read 華南 as かなん and it means South China as well. However, 行 would be こう or ぎょう and has not retained the profession/business line meaning at all.

An article from China Daily details some changes the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to make when it comes to the surname of babies.

Someone on a website made a reference about “Akamai” being a good name for Chinese. I pointed out that “Akamai” was probably based on the Japanese word akamatsu (赤松), which means “red pine”. In Chinese this would be chi4 song1. During this I suddenly wondered about the fact I hardly see any Chinese words starting with a vowel, but almost exclusively with consonants. I will need to consult my dictionaries, but a Chinese friend of mine said that of the aeiou group only a and e are used much at the start of a word, iou seem rare in contrast.

Japanese is very different in this aspect. The vowels are very important in comparison. I wonder how Korean is in this aspect.

The movie ‘House of Flying Daggers (十面埋伏)’ contains a song sung by Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) called ‘The Beauty Song (佳人曲)’.

北方有佳人，绝世而独立。
一顾倾人城，在顾倾人国。
宁不知倾城与倾国。
佳人难再得。

Which translates to something like the following:

In the north there is a beauty: Surpassing the world, she stands alone.
A glance from her will overthrow a city; A second glance will overthrow the State.
Don’t I know she can overthrow the city and the State?
But such a beauty cannot be found again!

This is a poem by the Han Dynasty poet Li Yannian (李延年).

This weekend I had the time to watch House of Flying Daggers (十面埋伏) again. I think the first time I saw it was when I was in Japan (日本). Of course, the problem at that point was that my Japanese (日本語) was definitely not good enough to understand the entire story. Although I could make good sense of it though.

In Japan the movie is known as Lovers.

In a previous entry I wrote about how the bone radical is written differently in some Chinese cases. Well, thanks to John H. Jenkins of Apple I found out that the People’s Republic of China made a switch from the traditional character to the one that has the corner on the left side. This way the strokecount is reduced by one. But for font designers it offers a small problem, since it means that you have to know your target audience quite well.

To sum it up: PRC uses the newer character, most likely Singapore does so too being another simplified Chinese user. Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macao, and Taiwan use the older character.

In the radical classification system called Kang Xi after the Chinese emperor Kang Xi we find 214 radicals. At position 188 we have the radical nicknamed ‘bone’ (骨 - hone). It is part of the group of radicals consisting out of 10 strokes (部首 - bushu).

The above image shows the character ‘bone’ in four fonts for the three languages of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The fonts used are STSong (Chinese), MingLiu (Chinese), MS Mincho (Japanese) and Batang (Korean). As can be seen the Chinese font is the only one that squares off the top image’s corner on the left-hand side. The other Chinese font and the Japanese and Korean font do so on the right-hand side.

I raised this issue on the Unicode list since the Unicode character charts have three points where ‘bone’ is encoded, to note: CJK Radicals Supplement 0×2ee3 (left-hand side), Kangxi Radicals 0×2fbb (right-hand side), and CJK Unified Ideographs 0×9aa8 (left-hand side).

I wonder if the discrepancy is a wrongly written letter during buddhist studies which was taken from China to Japan and subsequently later exported to Korea.

It’s too bad that support for XHTML 1.1 is so sketchy since Ruby support is only available as an XHTML module. Using Ruby definitely makes learning hanzi and kanji way easier (one of the reasons manga is littered with them).

Went to see the Fantastic Four on Saturday. A pretty good movie to be honest, very funny. Seeing Jessica Alba as Susan Richards (with appropriately dyed blonde hair) was actually enjoyable, of which I had my doubts before going to see it.

In other news, Mozilla/Firefox released Deer Park Alpha 2 is now released.

These are interesting tidbits from the release notes:

• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs
• Improvements to popup blocking

Been working on some ideas for my labs@tendra project. This will focus heavily on languages, especially Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and probably Hindi.