Re: [edict-jmdict] Jinmeiyou kanji

["Jim Breen" <jimbreen@*********>]

On 04/04/2008, Dennis Schrader <jpnthailand@gmail.com> wrote:

> I guess P markers indicating frequency of occurence would also be
> discriminatory, because "Svenkowski" should be considered equal in
> prevalence to "Jones", lest someone's feelings be hurt by the obvious.
> Enough, then, please forget that I even made the suggestion.

While I doubt anyone would regard surname frequencies that way, you
do come across oddities. When I was a Tokyo Gaidai we had a copy
of NTT's directory listings. We were looking at distributions of
surnames across prefrectures, but NTT put an embargo on publishing
anything, citing privacy as the reason. A bit stupid as you can
buy that list from NTT for direct marketing purposes. At that stage
they were charging a heap for the full list - 十万?, if I remember
correctly. The same data in Australia is a few dollars.

Jim

-- 
Jim Breen
Honorary Senior Research Fellow
Clayton School of Information Technology,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/