Your language sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Your language sucks

#71

Post by sho_hn » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 3:36 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #62

sho_hn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think your points are correct. However, it really is difficult and requires lots of specialized domain knowledge to properly support a big group of the world's languages. I'd almost go so far as to hire a specialist developer just to do international character handling if that was a requirement of the software.

It is difficult and does require some learning, yeah. In fact, it's more difficult than the article hints at, because while it falsely speaks of languages it's actually only concerned with writing systems, and a lot of the more interesting localization problems happen on the actual language/grammar level (for example, plain gettext isn't good enough to handle Korean post-positions, so we try to do better[1] in KDE).

But we can and have built reusable tools to shoulder much of the burden, and because these problems are so fundamental and culture-enabling, it can actually be a really rewarding and satisfying area to work in. In fact, I bet if you catch the author on a better day, I wonder if he wouldn't agree.

1 = https://techbase.kde.org/Localization/Concepts/Transcript#Ko...

Re: Your language sucks

#72

Post by Argorak » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 3:37 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #62

sho_hn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think your points are correct. However, it really is difficult and requires lots of specialized domain knowledge to properly support a big group of the world's languages. I'd almost go so far as to hire a specialist developer just to do international character handling if that was a requirement of the software.

Yes. You probably should. But there is no point in ranting, the same is true if you want a good graphics system.

Re: Your language sucks

#73

Post by benbreen » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 3:37 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #52

This makes me wonder what effect printing had on English. English used to be chock full of ligatures and special forms for letters (s and ſ for example). I can only imagine as a typesetter and type maker this was all very annoying and people simply started to drop them. However, WP claims [1] ligatures made typesetting easier and it was the introduction of Sans serif fonts in the 20th century that finally drove them…

Ligatures and letterforms like the "long S" (ſ) actually arose as a result of printing, interestingly. If you look at 13th century manuscripts created in Norman England, they're extremely legible and regularized. The very earliest printed texts ("incunabula") produced in England tried to mimic this medieval blackletter script, and are actually quite easy to read if you get used to them. By the Elizabethan era, many typesetters were switching to Italian-derived forms that they thought looked more distinct and elegant in a letterpress context (serif fonts like Garamond). German printers kept working with the medieval style, however, giving rise to the Fraktura script that we now tend to associate with WW2-era Germany.

I wrote a bit about the ſ letterform here:

http://theappendix.net/blog/2013/7/why-does-s-look-like-f-a-...

Re: Your language sucks

#74

Post by sillysaurus3 » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

eric_bullington wrote: post #70

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At first I thought you were being sarcastic, but then I realized you are actually arguing that only overly-sensitive people are offended when their language is insulted. 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 man…

That's very interesting. Thank you. Which cultures have gone to war over language? I'd like to educate myself on their history, and try to understand how something like language was one of the primary reasons for something as serious as a war.

Re: Your language sucks

#75

Post by bane » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #60

bane wrote: post #52

This makes me wonder what effect printing had on English. English used to be chock full of ligatures and special forms for letters (s and ſ for example). I can only imagine as a typesetter and type maker this was all very annoying and people simply started to drop them. However, WP claims [1] ligatures made typesetting easier and it was the introduction of Sans serif fonts in the 20th century that finally drove them…

Mechanizing Korean: The Evolution of Korean Typewriters is interesting thought-fodder along those lines. This LWN comment thread touched a little bit on the effect of printing on scripts, as well how different means of input, such as cellphone keyboards, interact with different scripts: http://lwn.net/Articles/607599/

I'd be really interested in reading that, but my google-fu can't seem to turn it up (I can find the author, Dr. Kim) but not the book. Any ideas where I can find it?

Re: Your language sucks

#76

Post by kazinator » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 3:40 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #69

stannol wrote: post #17

ß is not equivalent to ss, that's just plain wrong. Simple example: "In Maßen" means "in moderation" while "In Massen" means "en masse".

Well yes, because you're distinguishing between Masse and Maß (Mass). They're not precisely equivalent if you're attempting to determine meaning, but for many purposes they are. For example, searching for "ss" in Chrome will hit ß. That's good behavior.

Doesn't it depend on region? ISTR they don't use ß in Switzerland, so there is no Massen versus Maßen.

Re: Your language sucks

#77

Post by sho_hn » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 3:41 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #68

sho_hn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

i think the blocks-as-syllables concept in hangul makes lots of sense. that, and the straightforward mapping of letters to the english alphabet, made it fairly easy to learn how to read korean. understanding what you're reading is a completely different matter however.

The funky part being that the blocks aren't just syllables, the boundaries between blocks often correspond to the boundaries between morphemes, because of how the phonotactics of the language have evolved and Hangul was designed to fit them. To use English as an example, the word "cats" contains two morphemes, the stem "cat" and the plural suffix "s". In Korean+Hangul, this sort of combination tends to split neatly into blocks, and when there are multiple options for how the letters can be distributed over them, the orthography usually prefers the variant that keeps the morpheme spelled consistently everywhere. This gives the writing a neat sort of lego blocks feel.

There's plenty of other nifty traits to Hangul, such as the way many letters derive from each other graphically and thus lend themselves to two-step entry and reduced-number-of-keys inputs like keypads. And the design of the letters is featural, not arbitrary, that is they are often visualizations of tongue position or mouth shape when forming the respective sound.

The theme here is: There are many other concerns when it comes to the quality of a writing system. What the author is concerned with here isn't entirely unimportant, but a very, very narrow view.

Re: Your language sucks

#78

Post by ClashTheBunny » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 3:41 PM UTC

English still has a specific ligature that's treated specially if things are done by the book: "Mc". All Rolodex/card catalog systems included a special position for it and they were sorted separately.

Re: Your language sucks

#79

Post by lucb1e » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 3:41 PM UTC

dsirijus wrote: post #61

alkonaut wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sold. Now we just need to get 7.2 billion minus 2 people on-board.

I think pretty much everyone here would agree. It's common convention that we need to change.

I'm Dutch and trying to push for YYYY-MM-DD because it's the only format that makes sense when sorting. Classmates have a lot of trouble with it and still put "Notes 18-10.docx" in a directory full of "Notes 2014-10-18.odt"-like files.

Though I would be pretty fine with DD-MM-YYYY, at least be consistent... The only format that I really object to is the American MM/DD/YYYY format.

Re: Your language sucks

#80

Post by lomnakkus » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 3:43 PM UTC

arh68 wrote: post #47

vesinisa wrote: post #30

As a Finnish speaker, I must disappoint you that both Russian and English do have broken alphabets (although this might not affect their character coding). English makes extensive use of silent letters and letters whose pronunciation is dependent on the context (word) they appear in (take e in "context" and "appear" as an out of hat example). I haven't studied much Russian, but I know that the letter ъ in their alpha…

English pronunciation leads to algorithms like Soundex [1], which just wouldn't seem necessary if words were written purely phonetically. Hangul gets closer, in a way. It seems hard to make rhymes with words like 'reprise' and avoid 'despise'. Not all languages need to be so ambiguous. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

You really don't want a writing system which is too tied to pronunciation. If you go too far in that direction you'll end up with people with different dialects of the same language not being able to communicate clearly, even in writing! That would be a very undesirable state of affairs.

Yet you still want some correlation between spelling and pronunciation, otherwise the writing system essentially becomes completely arbitrary and thus impossible to learn (since we humans rely so much on pattern recognition for learning).