re: draft on mnemonic encoding

[Mark Crispin <MRC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As for the encoding of bo-po-mo-fo and kana, the question I have is: why?

Bo-po-mo-fo is used only in Taiwan, and only as a phonetic aid attached to
Chinese characters for young school-children to assist in pronouncing those
Chinese characters.  It disappears from books aimed at older students, and
adults often have to think a bit before recalling what the bo-po-mo-fo
representation of a Chinese word is.  Even so, no child would use bo-po-mo-fo
to express Chinese numbers (characters for 1 to 10, 100, 1000, and 10,000).

Although I have seen Chinese input systems based on bo-po-mo-fo in used in
Taiwan, they are not very popular compared to other input systems based on
constructing a character through various means.

In mainland China and Singapore, hanyu pinyin (the abomination with all the
bizarre C's, X's, and Q's) is now used as a standard representation of Chinese
pronounciation.  They use either pinyin or a character-construction means
(albeit different from those used in Taiwan) of inputting Chinese characters.

Curiously, many Taiwan-made products are also starting to offer pinyin as an
input mode; not necessarily because they like it but because it is simple to
implement and is becoming a requirement of the international market.

Japanese written in exclusively kana (as in the late katakana-only system
found on some DEC VT100's) is pretty much useless.  The only time you see
kana-only Japanese is in telegrams, which have to be pronounced out (due to
the unnatural representation) in order to be "read".  The information loss is
as great in a kana-only representation as it would be in a strictly romanized
representation.

I really don't see this system being used much by the Chinese or by the
Japanese (I'll note too that you missed Korean).  It offers no advantages over
using romanization.  What's more, there are already perfectly functional
systems for communication using the complete character set.

You might as well put an end to the fantasy and eliminate bo-po-mo-fo and kana
from your proposal.  Your proposal may be useful for alphabetic systems, but
it makes no sense for East Asian systems.  Trying to define a subset of an
East Asian writing system as an "alphabet" is not going to work.

I believe your proposal has a greater chance of success if it does not doom
itself by over-reaching its scope of applicability.