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Announcing Unicode 7.0

unicode-inc.blogspot.com

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Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#61

Post by sho_hn »

buster wrote: post #58
sho_hn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what about all the characters in Unicode that map to different phonemes or words in different languages? For example, Latin letters are sometimes used for different phonemes in different languages (and dialects, and applications like romanization), and Han logograms are sometimes used for different words/morphemes in different languages. How is that different from "picture of crap" mapping to different specific wo…

The distinction between normal language and graphical representation is the same as what is clipart and what is a official part of a language. Is poo a letter? No. Is A a letter? Yes. Fonts are not a clipart gallery and not a place for some committee to dump little pictures. If you want to show me a snowmen over the internet, use an image! Certainly people can understand an image of a snowmen.

But 粪 is also a character and means poo as well. It might not look like poo to you, but there's also examples of pictograms in the same script: 田 means field and looks like one.

Of course these are "official part of a language". But why? Under whose authority? You could cite "actual usage", but many of the emoji in Unicode certainly have seen actual usage for 10+ years in East Asia, so they qualify. And many of the letters in Unicode were in fact designed by committee prior to mass adoption by an actual population (for example the Hangul alphabet), so a lot of scripts already in Unicode originally didn't meet that barrier.

* = Letters vs. characters: Elements of alphabets are referred to as letters. Alphabets are graphical representations of phonemes, but many other writing systems encode syllables (syllabaries, like the Japanese kana), morphemes or words (logographies) instead. Unicode contains examples of all of these, and thus not just letters. So we want to talk about characters instead.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#62

Post by smackfu »

hf wrote: post #11

I value the Unicode effort so much, I consider its inconsistencies a major pain point in my life. Why, for the love of Zeus, is there no codepoint for GREEK SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER ALPHA Am I missing something? Why should I never want to subscript α? I know a few physicists who gladly would. It doesn't end there, see the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... which sports a consolidate…

Well, the real reason is that the existing subscripts are to support UPA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet

Here's where they argued that they needed subscript versions, rather than using the existing greek letters with a modifier: http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2442.pdf

It is kind of a mess though. Maybe it would have been better if they had named the repurposed glyphs like LATERAL POSTVELAR CONSONANT, but that's not generally how Unicode does things.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#63

Post by masklinn »

jstalin wrote: post #28

Forgive my ignorance, but how do these actually enter the real world? Do browsers adopt these new characters?

> Do browsers adopt these new characters?

No, fonts ship with them. Browsers don't really care, they see codepoints and ask underlying font-rendering API for the corresponding glyphs, then display that.

And these characters may not have anything to do with browsers, not are they restricted to browsers e.g. "emoji" originate in pre-smartphones cellphone-based text and email messages in japan for instance.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#64

Post by mmastrac »

greggman wrote: post #52
mmastrac wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically the entirety of the unicode range is supported by browsers right now -- they just don't exist in fonts at all. What Unicode does is say that "this codepoint" means "this". At that point, fonts start adding glyphs to mean "this" and authors start adding codepoints that refer to "this". If you look at FontAwesome, it uses characters in the "unicode private use area" -- which are effectively undefined -- but…

Actually AFAICT Chrome does not support the entirety of the unicode range right now. Safari and Firefox do. 🙅🎁４👨

Chrome does support these codepoints, but it doesn't support the format of Apple's PNG glyphs for emoji. Amusingly, it does support the android colored glyphs in Chrome for Android.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#65

Post by buster »

sho_hn wrote: post #61
buster wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction between normal language and graphical representation is the same as what is clipart and what is a official part of a language. Is poo a letter? No. Is A a letter? Yes. Fonts are not a clipart gallery and not a place for some committee to dump little pictures. If you want to show me a snowmen over the internet, use an image! Certainly people can understand an image of a snowmen.

But 粪 is also a character and means poo as well. It might not look like poo to you, but there's also examples of pictograms in the same script: 田 means field and looks like one. Of course these are "official part of a language". But why? Under whose authority? You could cite "actual usage", but many of the emoji in Unicode certainly have seen actual usage for 10+ years in East Asia, so they qualify. And many of the l…

Oh, the irony: http://oi60.tinypic.com/21o111t.jpg

That's pretty much my point.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#66

Post by yoz-y »

elfcard wrote: post #33
gtirloni wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the exact same question pop up in my mind after seeing the emoji's. I understand all characters can be considered nothing but pictures, but a thermometer, really? Is this used in any widespread language to be of significance to Unicode? Is Unicode trying to also offer some kind of clipart capability? I think we've seen our fair share of derailed projects in IT. Unicode is certainly a very critical project, whic…

That's amusing, because I looked at the thermometer, and thought, oh that's good, I can use that. But a chilli pepper, do we really need a character for a chilli pepper? So to answer your question, unicode is trying to bridge the gap in communication that offers a language independent set of recognizable glyphs that can be used to communicate. And one mans chilli pepper is another mans thermometer.

I suppose that the chilli pepper is there for restaurant menus which often use it as an indicator of spiciness.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#67

Post by sho_hn »

buster wrote: post #65
sho_hn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But 粪 is also a character and means poo as well. It might not look like poo to you, but there's also examples of pictograms in the same script: 田 means field and looks like one. Of course these are "official part of a language". But why? Under whose authority? You could cite "actual usage", but many of the emoji in Unicode certainly have seen actual usage for 10+ years in East Asia, so they qualify. And many of the l…

Oh, the irony: http://oi60.tinypic.com/21o111t.jpg That's pretty much my point.

For the record, the example was a Chinese character, which qualifies as "normal" according to the rulebook you set up. It's in active use in Mandarin and Japanese, and I'd think recognizable to many others (e.g. Cantonese readers or Koreans and Vietnamese). And it'll certainly show just fine on the default installs of most systems on the market right now.

http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=7C...

You're just being petty or culturally arrogant at this point, TBH.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#68

Post by meepmorp »

sho_hn wrote: post #37
meepmorp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think emoji are logograms. Logograms represent actual words in a language, as opposed to emoji which don't have a conventional mapping to words (unless you consider the unicode character names such mappings, which is odd since most users don't have any idea what the character names are).

You're right, but at the same time the level of abstraction it offers over spoken language is one of the reasons for the historic success of logographic writing. For example, in Chinese history it allowed mutually unintelligible dialects to more easily exchange information in writing, and it isolated orthography from shifts in pronunciation to a greater degree than possible with phonographic scripts. I feel like emoj…

> I'm getting far from the original topic with this rambling, but it still reads on it in one sense: There's a lot of variety to writing systems, and it's worth thinking about emoji as a spot on the spectrum instead of in isolation.

Except that emoji aren't a writing system. Writing systems encode language. Emoji encode emotions, perhaps, or suggest collections of ideas/emotions, but don't convey language per se because there's no conventionally defined correspondence between words in a language and a given emoji.

If I give you a string in English or Chinese or Arabic or Amharic, using the conventional writing systems for those languages, each string will be interoperable as a specific sequence of words in that language. A string of emoji doesn't work that way.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#69

Post by sho_hn »

meepmorp wrote: post #68
sho_hn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but at the same time the level of abstraction it offers over spoken language is one of the reasons for the historic success of logographic writing. For example, in Chinese history it allowed mutually unintelligible dialects to more easily exchange information in writing, and it isolated orthography from shifts in pronunciation to a greater degree than possible with phonographic scripts. I feel like emoj…

> I'm getting far from the original topic with this rambling, but it still reads on it in one sense: There's a lot of variety to writing systems, and it's worth thinking about emoji as a spot on the spectrum instead of in isolation. Except that emoji aren't a writing system. Writing systems encode language. Emoji encode emotions, perhaps, or suggest collections of ideas/emotions, but don't convey language per se beca…

Are you suggesting we turn falling into a specific set of relationships between symbols an entry requirement for the Unicode database, though? How would that look like in practice? I agree you're highlighting a useful difference, but I'm not sure about implications.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#70

Post by sisk »

buster wrote: post #12

Do we really need small pictures in fonts?

You might not need them but consider this for a moment:

When I was a kid, there was a boy in my class who was mute. He carried a chalkboard and flashcards to facilitate communication. Eventually, he was chosen to pilot a device that was sort of like a keyboard with oversized keys. Each key had a pictograph on it[0].

Wouldn't it be nice for him if the flashcards and keyboard device had a consistent set of characters that were easily recognizable not only by him but by the people with whom he was communicating?

Now, would he ever need "MAN IN SUIT LEVITATING"? Probably not (you never know!) but I'm glad there is a standard set of otherwise useful pictographs for people like him.

[0] - I'm in my late 20s but this was when few families owned computers, let alone super-helpful handheld devices. Also worth mentioning that this boy knew ASL but attended a regular public school where few students and faculty could so the chalkboard and flashcards were infinitely more practical.

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