[Cryptography] canonicalizing unicode strings.

Bill Frantz frantz at pwpconsult.com
Thu Feb 1 19:58:10 EST 2018


On 2/1/18 at 12:16 PM, johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) wrote:

>(This includes people who know no English, but they
>know enough of the sounds to type the pinyin.)

Pinyin was developed by the Chinese communists as part of their 
successful attempt to spread literacy in China. It is a phonetic 
script that accurately describes the sound of Chinese 
characters. Resemblance to European pronunciation is 
intentional, but there are some letters, like "c" which don't 
resemble any European pronunciation, but fill a hole in the 
spectrum of Chinese sound. When I studied Chinese, I was just 
glad that they chose the Roman alphabet. They considered using 
the Cyrillic alphabet because of their friendship with the Russians.

The other major inovation was the simplified character set. 
These characters are a lot quicker to write than the traditional 
characters. Simplified characters are used in Singapore while 
traditional characters are used in Taiwan.

Cheers - Bill

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