Supporting the Character Sets of Japanese Kanji and Korean Hangul in the ADABAS/NATURAL System

Software AG of Far East (SAGFE) has established various system environments peculiar to Japanese use since Japanese Kanji was supported on ADABAS for the first time in 1978. The supporting of Japanese language, which started by putting the character strings on a special Kanji printer, has recently been improving with the development of terminal equipment and controllers. This paper describes the progress of our supports for Japanese language at SAGFE and Software AG (SAG), West Germany and a study on Korean Hangul done by SAG and Penta Computer Korea as well as Japanese Kanji. Additionally, the method called DBCS (double-byte character set) support is proposed. We discuss the problems and solve those problems by adapting the fourth generation language, NATURAL, as a SAG product. 1. Supporting Japanese Kanji on ADABAS _ The Japanese language borrowed extensively from the Chinese Hanzi by way of Korean to write their own language around 1,500 years ago. Later, the characters came to symbolize native Japanese words similar in meaning to that of the Chinese. permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that Ihe copies are not made or distribured for direct commercial advantage. tie DASFAA copyright notice and the title of the publication and ifs date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Organizing Commilke of fhe IntematiOnd Symposium on DaCabase Systems for Advanced Applications. To copy otherwise. or to republish. requin-s a fee and /or special jxrmission fmm fhe Organizing Committee. Modern Japanese is written as a mixture of ideograms, Kanji, and native phonetic letters, Kana. The Kana phonetic alphabet exists as Hiragana and Katakana, which serve different purposes and differ stylistically. A typical passage of Japanese writing contains Kanji, Hiragana, and perhaps also Katakana. Both Kana syllabaries cor+sist of 46 basic symbols each, and Kanji chatiacters are limited to about 2,000 symbols for off%ial and daily use. . JAPANESE CHARACTER -----S!!wiS -----=-.==============Y!!! ====-==----==-=. Fig.1 -1 Japanese character and code representation In the early Japanese computer market, there was intense interest in the establishme& of a system to handle Kanji. However, it took a long time and a vast sum of money to create compatibility with existing systems and to develop devices peculiar to Japanese use. Generally one byte is used to denote a’character, but the eight-bits byte provides for as many as 256 characters. Japanese Kanji must be represented by codes that are usually two bytes lorig because there are many different kinds of characters(Fig.l=1). This point is pressing computer manufacturers and vendors in Japan to greatly revise standard systems. A great number of Kanji typing methods have been developed to date, all of which fall into three main International Symposium on Database Systems for Advanced Appllcatlons Seoul, Korea, April, 1989