61–70 of 133 posts
I'll do my best to fix my language as soon as you fix your units. Your units suck.
Let's not forget the horrible mm/dd/yyyy format. I need y'all to just use U.S English combined with ISO dates and metric units. Thanks.
Now we just need to get 7.2 billion minus 2 people on-board.
Clearly tongue-in-cheek, and informative. So nice somehow. But still: the fact that English phonology and orthography are only lightly related, and hardly anyone is willing to do the effort to fix this, should give the author second thoughts on complaining about others' artifacts and not complaining about the ones in English. Many languages have pure or nearly-pure phonetic orthographies, which are a pleasure to use.…
> and informative. There's a lot of half-knowledge and misdirection in this blog post, though. * Languages aren't writing systems, and vice-versa. * There are often decent reasons and upsides to the things he calls out as sucking. His rant on Hangul, for example - for human users, the morpho-syllabic grouping of letters into blocks in Korean writing tends to be beneficial, because they make the orthography of morphem…
The points made may be salient, but the tone is so condescending as to be nearly unreadable without getting angry. A large number of his points around languages that are radically different from English could be summed up as: "Your language sucks to deal with in computing because your native country didn't develop computing machinery first." This fairly reeks of tone-deafness.
Who cares about tone? Why be sensitive in this context? It's a language. Why would anyone get offended when someone says "Your language sucks"? It's not like they're saying your hair sucks or your tongue is incapable of tasting sweets or your ear is shaped like a tulip. It's a language . No one can help what language they learned when they were a child. It wasn't up to them. Of course some of them are going to suck o…
Yet article 1 of the United Nations Charter states that one of the four purposed of the UN is "To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion".
Language politics are in fact really complicated. I myself am from a country that less than a decade ago went without a federal government for 20 months because the different language groups couldn't get along.
> It's a language. No one can help what language they learned when they were a child.
And while we're at it, why would anyone be sensitive about skin color or nationality?
Clearly tongue-in-cheek, and informative. So nice somehow. But still: the fact that English phonology and orthography are only lightly related, and hardly anyone is willing to do the effort to fix this, should give the author second thoughts on complaining about others' artifacts and not complaining about the ones in English. Many languages have pure or nearly-pure phonetic orthographies, which are a pleasure to use.…
I don't see anything here that hasn't been solved by ICU. Am I missing something? http://site.icu-project.org/ Anecdote time: I once worked on a software project where all of the sorting was done using an internal library made by a Large Trustworthy International Corporation. We discovered halfway through that the transitive property was not being maintained during sorts mixing half-width and full-width numerals. (In…
"ICU provides a data-driven, flexible, and run-time-customizable mechanism called "tailoring". Tailoring overrides the default order of code points and the values of the ICU Collation Service attributes"
Also, you sometimes need context to properly sort strings. Examples:
Are you sorting phone book entries or items in a dictionary? In some languages, that does make a difference.
Are you sorting Swiss German or German German?
Given two 'obviously' Italian words, should you apply Italian collation rules? You probably/maybe shouldn't when both are words in an English-language dictionary.
Some library catalogs want(ed?) to sort "2001: a Space Odyssey" as "Two thousand and…" (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog#Sorting)
For the latter, even that ICU feature to customize sorting won't help you.
Clearly tongue-in-cheek, and informative. So nice somehow. But still: the fact that English phonology and orthography are only lightly related, and hardly anyone is willing to do the effort to fix this, should give the author second thoughts on complaining about others' artifacts and not complaining about the ones in English. Many languages have pure or nearly-pure phonetic orthographies, which are a pleasure to use.…
> and informative. There's a lot of half-knowledge and misdirection in this blog post, though. * Languages aren't writing systems, and vice-versa. * There are often decent reasons and upsides to the things he calls out as sucking. His rant on Hangul, for example - for human users, the morpho-syllabic grouping of letters into blocks in Korean writing tends to be beneficial, because they make the orthography of morphem…
ß is not equivalent to ss, that's just plain wrong. Simple example: "In Maßen" means "in moderation" while "In Massen" means "en masse".
For example, searching for "ss" in Chrome will hit ß. That's good behavior.
The points made may be salient, but the tone is so condescending as to be nearly unreadable without getting angry. A large number of his points around languages that are radically different from English could be summed up as: "Your language sucks to deal with in computing because your native country didn't develop computing machinery first." This fairly reeks of tone-deafness.
Who cares about tone? Why be sensitive in this context? It's a language. Why would anyone get offended when someone says "Your language sucks"? It's not like they're saying your hair sucks or your tongue is incapable of tasting sweets or your ear is shaped like a tulip. It's a language . No one can help what language they learned when they were a child. It wasn't up to them. Of course some of them are going to suck o…
Since language is a core component of human culture, many people become offended when their language is insulted or threatened. Countries have gone to war over language. Provinces succeed over language. Language is a very, very sensitive topic in many places, such as Quebec, Catalonia, the nations of former Yugoslavia, and so on and so forth.
You may think that people shouldn't be sensitive if their language is denigrated or insulted, but that is demonstrably not the case now. Some of us may not care, but many people -- maybe even most people -- would become angry or annoyed if their native language is open ridiculed.