+++ Ruben [Feb 02 15 08:41 ]:
I was trying to, in German, where this behaviour is annoying, while this may have not occurred to English users who predominate here (and don’t have as many gendered nouns). It’s difficult to consider edge cases in languages you don’t know, but that’s why there’s a proposal.
And it’s great to hear about things like this; such comments are very helpful.
It seems to me that
**Goose** **house**是由日本一群創作歌手所組成的樂團。
would also do the job for you.So I don’t find this argument compelling. In your case it looks ok, because CJK characters look very different from the Latin alphabet, so there’s a visual demarkation of sorts. But in the Latin alphabet, this
Liebe Professor*innen und Mitarbeiter*innen,is more readable to a parser than to a human if it’s intended for emphasis. A human would write something like thisLiebe Professor*innen* *und* *Mitarbeiter*innen,.
It’s an edge case in a language written by millions against an edge case in languages written by more than a billion.
Hm, weren’t you the one advocating resolving issues by voting?
But seriously, I don’t think it’s a matter of numbers. Just like with the line breaks, we have a situation where making something slightly easier for people who write in language or style X would make things impossible for people who write in language or style Y. It’s not very nice to make it impossible for Chinese writers to emphasize foreign phrases in order to make it a bit easier for German writers to write gender-ambiguous nouns.
I don’t know if there’s been a big discussion, but if CJK scripts handle whitespace very differently (see also the discussion on linebreaks), maybe it makes sense to have a different set of defaults.
Currently there is no localization in the spec. One might consider adding it, so that the syntax rules for Chinese locales were different than, say, German.
But I’d really like to avoid this kind of complexity. I think it also has a high potential to confuse people. And what if you have a mixed text, with passages in Chinese and passages in German? Doing this right would require adding “start-Chinese” and “end-Chinese” commands, and now it’s looking like LaTeX.
A related area that probably needs more thought here is languages with right-to-left writing: Explicit RTL indication in pure Markdown