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Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

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Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#121

Post by lifthrasiir »

wheybags wrote: post #72

This kind of stupid thing is my problem with Unicode. We have all this baggage for stuff that nobody uses , and we need to deal with it forever. The worst for me is the way there is no possible way to encode a grapheme cluster as a constant size, so using Unicode make it impossible to have simple character access like an old style c string, no matter how big you make your char, even though it's totally possible with…

Your notion of character doesn't necessarily match others, and there are many cases where the number of possible "characters" in some notion is unbounded. Unicode provides a very well-defined superset of those notions for you. Collecting characters is only a minor portion of their jobs.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#122

Post by tzs »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #41
koboll wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it probably deserves the Pluto treatment: decertification as a character. One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did.

Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the containing document without losing any information. Roughly, I should be able to put a transcription of that one translation from the 1400s on Wikisource without using images. You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but it doesn't change Unicode's mission. Be…

If that was once its mission, it was clearly abandoned long ago. They rejected Klingon characters on the grounds that it has low usage for communication, and that many of the people who do communicate in Klingon use a latinized form.

ꙮ seems to just be a fancy way of writing О. I haven't seen anything that says it has a different meaning. The arguments for excluding Klingon seem to apply even more so to ꙮ.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#124

Post by robocat »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #101
JohnFen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought "santa" meant "saint"?

> I thought "santa" meant "saint"? Well, santa is a Spanish word meaning "holy" and saint is a cognate French word meaning the same thing. They descend from Latin sanctus ; compare sanctify . When the prayer goes "holy Mary, mother of god", "holy Mary" is an exact equivalent of "santa María".

Might as well mention “Sancta Marīa” in Latin, for example from the Christian Hail Mary[1], a recorded Latin version[2], written Latin next to English and Spanish[3] and of course translated into thousands of languages[4] although unfortunately mostly written using /A-Z/i; I am an atheist interested in languages.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail_Mary

[2] https://glaemscrafu.jrrvf.com/english/avemaria.html

[3] https://hymnary.org/text/hail_mary_full_of_grace_the_lord_is...

[4] http://www.marysrosaries.com/Rosary_prayers_in_different_lan...

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#125

Post by eternityforest »

yakireev wrote: post #108
kadoban wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For as inclusive as that mission is, it seems weird to me how limited in certain areas unicode is. For instance, people use peach emoji since there isn't one for butt, eggplant since there's no penis, etc. This doesn't contradict the stated goal exactly, but it seems against the spirit of it at least.

One could argue that emoji should have never been added to Unicode in the first place. Peaches and butts are images, pictures, illustrations, whatever - but they are not characters. There's no writing system which has a colored drawing of a peach as a character.

But that doesn't change the fact that most people use them snd like them, and there is not much technical disruption. They just chose practicality over purity.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#126

Post by gnulinux »

wheybags wrote: post #72

This kind of stupid thing is my problem with Unicode. We have all this baggage for stuff that nobody uses , and we need to deal with it forever. The worst for me is the way there is no possible way to encode a grapheme cluster as a constant size, so using Unicode make it impossible to have simple character access like an old style c string, no matter how big you make your char, even though it's totally possible with…

Have you ever written software before Unicode? We had N different encodings for each language, each culture, each country. There were all kinds of bugs creeping up, and software that works perfectly well could be buggy for one random language. Unicode abstracted all of this away from the programmer in a pretty simple fashion. I simply do not see how we're paying the "complexity tax" by using Unicode, unless you're writing a library that handles Unicode (which you shouldn't do, you should use existing libraries) you don't need to know anything about Unicode.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#127

Post by gerikson »

runarberg wrote: post #110
BlueTemplar wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is temporary though, soon people will look at you funny if you say that Pluto is a planet - and/or they might not even have heardof it (though of course that is still worth learning about in an History of Science context). We do NOT keep discovering new planets, rather minor planets (I agree that the term is confusing), more than a million of them discovered in the Solar System now, like the 9007 James Bond.

It could go either way, it is not always that the scientific meaning wins out, especially not when even scientists don’t find the new definition useful. When I think of a planet, I think of a world that has active geology that isn’t a moon (I know excluding moons is arbitrary, and perhaps I shouldn’t do that; but hey, that’s language for you). I honestly don’t care about the orbit, and I bet that when most people thi…

> When I think of a planet, I think of a world that has active geology

Wouldn't that definition rule out gas giants?

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#128

Post by wongarsu »

JohnFen wrote: post #75
tempodox wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Santa Clause” would translate to “holy clause”. There might be such a thing but I think you meant Santa Claus :)

I thought "santa" meant "saint"?

Saint is more or less the same as holy, just used as a title. It comes from Old French saint, seinte "holy, pious, devout," from Latin sanctus "holy, consecrated"

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#130

Post by yakireev »

eternityforest wrote: post #125
yakireev wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that emoji should have never been added to Unicode in the first place. Peaches and butts are images, pictures, illustrations, whatever - but they are not characters. There's no writing system which has a colored drawing of a peach as a character.

But that doesn't change the fact that most people use them snd like them, and there is not much technical disruption. They just chose practicality over purity.

Most people (me included) like funny cat videos and send funny cat videos. Shall we include some to Unicode?

I mean, this ship has long sailed, but that was a mistake nevertheless. Not everything has to be a unicode character.

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