171–180 of 200 posts
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But I don’t know Chinese so I don’t know that is an arbitrary Chinese character with the Latin A for contrast. I’ve seen languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet occasionally intersperse Latin letters before so until I was told just now I assumed that this Chinese character with A had some significance in Chinese. So I don’t think it’s very effective at that.
Really? When I first saw it I understood it must have to do with changing languages.
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> The question isn't "where are you from", but "which country speaks a language that is similar to how you speak" Exactly. And that's the problem. There are countries where more than one language are officially spoken and differ (in the case of German enough that neither German nor Austrian German are usable, whereas German German is usable for Austrian German and vice versa) and these languages do not have their own…
You seem to be approaching this backwards. Swiss German is German. It gets a German flag. Swiss French is French. It gets a French flag. As a Brit you get used to American flags to denote English. It's just not a big deal. I mean I even use US English most of the time as I prefer the keyboard layout. Barely any languages exist in the world without an associated country. You're looking for a problem where none exists.…
But the flag was useful to show in the ui where the language setting was. This is especially useful when the language has been set to something I cannot read. I don't know which of 语言设定 and 重置设备 will allow me to set the language back to English. Also flags in the menu means that I can find English easier than 英语
Wikipedia uses a “文Ａ” icon; IMHO far better than a flag. What flag would you expect to see? As for finding the language in the menu, listening a language in the foreign language seems like bad design too. The menu should list “English” as an option! See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#/languages
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I know Ukrainian and Russian are different languages, that’s why I specified “a Russian-speaking Ukrainian”. Plenty of Ukrainians are native Russian speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine Speaking a language natively is not the same thing as nationality or allegiance to a flag, and it can be grossly offensive to confuse the two.
If you're a Russian speaking Ukrainian, you're speaking like the Russians, which is the sort of analogy I'm referring to.
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Not to mention that many currencies don't have symbols at all.
Well, how many languages have flags? There are thousands of languages, but hundreds of countries. Surely, some languages would be left without a flag? And this doesn’t affect just some "obscure" languages. For instance, what flag would you use for Arabic, an official UN language? What language does a flag of India, most populous language stand for?
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Not necessarily. It completely depends on the situation. As another example: gendered bathrooms. The icons used on gendered bathrooms have a woman wearing a skirt, and a man wearing trousers. These icons are "wrong": a man can wear a skirt, and a woman can wear trousers (in fact, nowadays most women do). It's nonetheless certainly more useful to have a "wrong" icon than none at all in this case.
Bathrooms need icons because they have to assume users who can't read, or don't know the local language. None of these two problems apply to language selection 99.9999% of the time: if you can't read, you can't use a system based on reading no matter the language, and if you don't recognize the name of a language in a list, you also do not want to select it.
So, if you saw any of these languages in a list, you wouldn't select them?
英语
영어
อังกฤษ
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Agreed. Some flag, US, Chinese, I don’t care, signifies “language” in the context of software . That is an easy, universal UI pattern. I don’t see the need to upend this for some notion of offense or other type of PCness.
> some notion of offense or other type of PCness As just one example of what we're talking about, let's take Ireland: after generations of cultural oppression England caused a famine in Ireland that reduced the population by at least 20% between millions of deaths and millions of immigrants. Ireland still hasn't recovered its population to the pre-famine levels. The Irish are literally still recovering from their abu…
Counterpoint to this website: it is convenient to have symbols to represent things. I don't see them suggesting anything better than flags.
Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship. This is a good move by Apple. Also, as a color blind person it is quite frustrating when people make content and use a flag emoji instead of a country name. Often mousing over doesn't work. Emojis are not semantic information.
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> Wikipedia uses a “文Ａ” icon; IMHO far better than a flag. It's not exactly suggestive of a language selector. 文 means "text". "A" doesn't mean anything at all.
At least to a Chinese reader it’s immediately obvious. 文 is the suffix to all written languages. 中文 英文 法文 西班牙文 etc.
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Quite obviously you never interacted with any software which defaults to the language you can't read, despite having a support for the language you do understand.
How would flags in the language selection help? The actual problem is finding the language selection at all (which still has an icon of a (stylised) globe on MacOS).
I remember windows having flags for the languages, but now it is a strange A symbol that I have no clue what it is and I'd have no chance of finding if it was in the wrong language.