CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

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Chapter 3: Character Set Standards

locale for which the character set standard is intended. Much of what is included in their

pages, out of necessity, is somewhat mundane. is is simply the nature of standards. To

further rene my bluntness, standards can be boring. I have made a concerted eort not

to be so in this chapter.

Some character set standards discussed in this chapter may not yet be

established—they are in dra form, which means that their designations

may change, and in some cases may never be published in nal form. Such

character sets are indicated by a trailing “” in the portion of their designa-

tion used to specify the year of establishment. As of this writing, aected

standards include China’s GB/T 13131-2 and GB/T 13132-2.

NCS Standards

Long before any CCS standards existed in the CJKV locales (or even before the concept

of a CCS standard existed!), several NCS standards were established for pedagogical pur-

poses. ese are considered to be the rst attempts to limit the number of ideographs in

common use.

e NCSes that are described in this chapter include only ideographs. Everyone is expect-

ed to learn hiragana and katakana (in Japan) or hangul (in Korea). Only for ideographs,

which number in the tens of thousands, is there a need to dene a set (and thus, limit the

number) of characters that are taught in school or used elsewhere within ...