CJK

From Free net encyclopedia

CJK can also stand for Centre Jeunes Kamenge.

CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which constitute the main East Asian languages. The term is used in the field of software and communications internationalization.

The term CJKV means CJK plus Vietnamese, which used Chinese characters prior to adopting quốc ngữ (see Vietnamese alphabet).

These languages all have a shared characteristic: Their writing systems are partly or entirely based on Chinese characters—hànzì in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean, and chữ nôm in Vietnamese. Chinese requires at least 4,000 characters for a basic vocabulary and up to 40,000 characters for reasonably complete coverage. Whereas Japanese and Korean use fewer characters—general literacy in Japan can be expected with about 2,000 characters—idiosyncratic use of Chinese characters in proper names requires knowledge (and therefore availability) of many more. The number of characters required for complete coverage of all these languages' needs cannot fit in the 256-character code space of 8-bit encodings, requiring at least a 16-bit fixed width character encoding or multi-byte variable-length encodings. The 16-bit fixed width encodings, such as Unicode up to and including version 2.0, are now deprecated due to the requirement that software in China support the GB18030 character set.

Although CJK encodings have common character sets, the encodings often used to represent them have been developed separately by different East Asian governments and software companies, and are mutually incompatible. Unicode has attempted, with some controversy, to unify the character sets in a process known as Han unification.

CJK character encodings should consist minimally of Han characters plus language-specific phonetic scripts such as pinyin, bopomofo, hiragana, katakana, and hangul.

CJK character encodings include:

Big5
EUC-JP
EUC-KR
GB18030 (the mandated standard in the People's Republic of China)
GB2312
ISO 2022-JP
Shift-JIS
Unicode

The CJK character sets take up the bulk of the Unicode code space. There is much controversy among Japanese experts of Chinese characters about the desirability and technical merit of the Han unification process used to map multiple Chinese and Japanese characters sets into a single set of unified glyphs.

Chinese and Japanese can be written both left-to-right and top-to-bottom, but is usually considered a left-to-right script when discussing encoding issues.

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References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

DeFrancis, John. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990. ISBN 0824810686.
Hannas, William C. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. ISBN 082481892X (paperback); ISBN 0824818423 (hardcover).
Lunde, Ken. CJKV Information Processing. Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates, 1998. ISBN 1565922247.

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