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I'm not a Japanese expert by any means, but here are of my notes on what I've discovered about Japanese scripts.

Japanese is an East Asian script, but differs significantly from the Chinese script because it uses three phonetic scripts in addition to the Chinese kanji characters.

Multiple Scripts

The Japanese script is considered one of the most complex because it combines four writing systems in one. Fortunately, three of them are phonetic, but you cannot be considered an educated until you can also read Chinese Kanji. The scripts are:

• Katakana - Based on Chinese, but each symbol is a syllable. Used for foreign words or technical vocabular.
• Hiragana - Also based on Chinese, but rounder. Each symbol is also a syllable. Often used for grammatical endings.
• Romāji - Roman (English) alphabet, often mixed in with other scripts in modern Japan
• Kanji - the set of Chinese characters used in Japanese. However, not all Japanese characters are the same as the characters used for Chinese (hanzi) (Japan Reference)

Phonetic scripts developed in Japan partly as a way to write Japanese case endings (okurigana) not found in Chinese.

Still more

In addition to the forms found on the Web, there are a few more variants

• Furigana - Kanji Characters with minature Katakana or Hiragana above or below to show the phonetic pronunciation. Technially
• Hentaigana - an archaic syllabary found in soba noodle shops, diplomas, invitations and other times when a formal script might be used. Can also refer to a style of Japanese calligraphy.
• Manyogana - Another syllabary with Chinese Kanji used only for their phonetic value (not their meaning). These were used in ancient poetry.

Information about these additional scripts can be found at these sites:

• Wikipedia Japanese Writing System (links in right menu)
• Japanese Studies Com Hentaigana
• Kanamoji (Hiragana and Katakana) in About the Japanese language

As of September 2006, neither Hentaigana or Manyogana blocks had been develeoped in Unicode, but there may be non-Unicode fonts that could be used.

Computing Set up

If you just want to set up on Japanese on your Windows or Mac, see the Penn State Japanese Set Up Page.

Language codes are important, but in my humble opinion, kind of confusingly implemented. A classic example is Cantonese, the language of Hong Kong, which has three competing language codes

The codes are result of the fact that there isn’t a good consensus on whether Cantonese is a language or a dialect. Which one is best? It depends on what you’re doing...

• zh-HK (ISO-639) - the oldest and safest code to use because software knows what it is
• zh-yue (IANA) - to tag the script/language as Chinese, but add dialect/language information.
• yue (ISO-639-3) - to tag content as separate languages (with local dialects). You may need to convert to zh-HK though.

Read below for the gritty details.

Cantonese Language or Dialect?

As most Chinese specialists know, the language to buy fruit in Hong Kong is quite different from the language to buy fruit in Shanghai or Beijing. When my aunt traveled to Beijing, she learned some basic shopping terms, but by the time they got to Shanghai, the tour guide told her to not bother.

Linguists tend to call these separate linguistic forms languages because the ability to understand speech from different regions is low to non-existent. In fact the names are Mandarin (Beijing), Cantonese (Hong Kong) or Wu. If you learn Chinese in the U.S., you are probably learning Mandarin which is the national standard (even in Taiwan). If you want to do business in Hong Kong though, you need to take a separate Cantonese class.

Speakers from China, on the other hand, call them dialects. They understand that they are very different, but think they are forms of the same master language because they are written in the same script (and they all do descend from a mother Proto-Chinese language spoken centuries ago). As far as the Chinese are concerned, we really have to worry about just one language only.

The interesting dilemma is that because Hong Kong was a British colony for so long, Cantonese gained some prominence as the business language of Hong Kong. And apparently there are local quirks to the Hong Kong writing system. So the tech community decided long ago that a separate code was needed. But...what it should be?

zh-HK

The first pass was zh-HK or Chinese as spoken in the colony of Hong Kong which was created under the original ISO-639 language code scheme. At the time of ISO-639, only national dialectal differences were allowed to be recognized. Hong Kong was a British colony so had its own country code.

This is the code used by the Microsoft Spell checker for instance; none of the other codes are recognized by Microsoft (even though they are better in some senses). This code will probably exist as long as Unicode does...

The problem is that there was no way to encode the other languages/dialects of China because the regions did not have their own country codes...and sometimes this was necessary.

zh-yue

At some point the language technology groups realized that dialects weren’t restricted to countries, so alternate dialect tags were created including this one. By the way yue is the (Mandarin) Chinese form for Cantonese.

All the Chinese forms got dialect tags (even Shanghai or zh-wuu), so it is an improvement. On the other hand it’s still not linguistically accurate (they’re really not dialects). Even worse, few major vendors have implemented these tags. So you can tag your content with a better tag, but the applications may get confused ...

yue

This tag says Cantonese is its own language. And so is Wu of Shanghai (wuu). Awesome! This code is from the latest language tag scheme (ISO-639-3) which was developed more by linguists to reflect linguistic reality.

It’s good for noting script differences (yue-Trad, yue-Latn) or regional Cantonese dialects.

But as with zh-yue, Microsoft and other vendors do not recognize it yet and for all I know, may never recognize it. There’s a good chance your browser may get a little confused if it sees yue instead of zh-HK.

Does that mean the linguists are wasting their time? Probably not. For linguistic database/archive applications, you probably would want to use the more accurate yue tag, especially in keyword metadata.

The trick would be that during PUBLICATION, you might need a utility that also marks your yue content as zh-HK or whatever.

Stupid? Probably, but it wouldn’t be the first time a Unicode specialist had to account for backwards compatibility.

Other Chinese Codes

Documented at http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/chinese.html#dialect...with much more neutral language.

Vietnamese is different from other East Asian languages because it is currently written in the Latin alphabet (same as English). On the other hand it has so many tone marks that it is treated differently from "typical" Western European languages like Spanish and French.

The following site - http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/ is an excellent source of Vietnamese information.

FYI - In the past, it was written in Chinese, but this system is rarely used in modern Viet Nam.

Did you want robust vertical text or furigana support on the Web? Well maybe you'll get it some day, but not in early 2007 (unless you go the PDF route).

But check in with the W3C RUBY Annotation Specification page for more details and tests. Currently, CSS3 is scheduled to include RUBY formatting attributes.

CSS3 is also scheduled to include a "writing-mode" attribute for other types of vertical writing, but these must be incorporated into the various browsers and text devices.

FYI - There is a vertical text CSS spec out there but it ONLY works in Internet Explorer 6/7 for Windows, so I don't recommend it. It's documented at the Penn State TLT International Vertical Text page.

But I'm positive....Some year, "someday" of vertical text support may be today!

The site Unicode in Japan tracks the history of encoding in Japan and explains the technical and not-so-technical issues for Unicode detractors. An even harsher criticism was written by Norman Goundry (date 2001).

One problem for the East Asian languages is that different countries (China, Taiwan, Japan) may use different shapes to draw the "same" character. But since Chinese writing is made up of thousands of charcters, the question then become how many variations are needed.

The Unicode Consortium proposed Han Character Unification to avoid designating too many characters, but this has its quirks. One potential problem is that the same "character" could look very different if you are using a Japanese font vs. a Chinese font. Thus you are back to specifying fonts again.

Issues like this are one reason national character sets like Shift-JIS for Japanese persist. For instance, the Mojikyo Character set has been developed apart from Unicode specifically to support archaic Japanese characters and other variants.

Is it hopeless? Probably not. For one thing Unicode has been rapidly evolving so that 2006 Unicode is quite different from 2001 Unicode. Every version from Unicode 3.1 through Unicode 5.0 has added characters and specifications to resolve older issues with Asian encoding.

Another plus is that the Unicode Consortium seems to be changing its policy on unifying every script...all sorts of historical variations are popping up in even the Western European Latin blocks. My favorite has been the encoding of German Fraktur letters and Gaelic alphabetic variants.

This article by Bill Poser of the Language Log explains some of the mechanics of Simiplified vs. Traditional Chinese characters and the rationale for some of the objections raised. He also confirms that Simplified characters may be more phonetically based on Mandarin forms, and could be harder for non Mandarin speakers to memorize.