[Tutor] name shortening in a csv module output

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Fri, 24 Apr 2015 12:46:20 +1000, "Steven D'Aprano" writes:
>The Japanese, Chinese and Korean 
>governments, as well as linguists, are all in agreement that despite a 
>few minor differences, the three languages share a common character set.

I don't think that is quite the way to say it.  There are characters,
which look exactly the same in all three languages, and the linguists
are mostly in agreement that the reason they look the same is that the
are the same.

But it is more usual to write Korean, these days, not with Chinese
characters, (hanja) but with hangul.  In the 15th century, the King,
Sejong the great decided that Koreans needed a phoenetic alphabet, and
made one.   It doesn't look anything like chinese.  And it is a phonetic,
alphabetic langauge, not a stroke-and-character one.

Due to the fact that the aristocracy liked using the hanja
as they always had, it only really caught on in the 20th century.  So
if you deal with older historical Korean documents, knowing hanja will
be essential to you.  But if you just need modern Korean, you won't,
because these days, South Koreans write their language with hangul,
and a few Chinese characters tossed in on rare occasion, while
I am told that in North Korean they don't use any Chinese characters
at all.

for the unicode aspects,
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language_and_computers

Laura