I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

I came in expecting to read an article bemoaning some niche language and playing the diversity card. I was not disappointed, but as I kept reading, the author made some very good points.

I don't really care that the organization is run by white men who speak English, because frankly the entire computing industry and telecommunications industry is based on that. I'm not going to argue about the original sin there, because the facts speak for themselves: they got shit done.

What I do find really disturbing, though, is that somehow both Linear A and Linear B are included, in their (as known) entirety, while Bengali is not--two languages spoken and written by nobody for over a millenia are included whereas a language spoken and written by millions of people is not. That's bad.

The discussion of somehow creating a CJK superset and then deviations to support each of those languages is worse, and the author's remark about trying to "unify" Greek, Roman, Cyrillic, and Swedish struck home.

Personally, I think that it's nice to have an ever-decreasing number of languages to support, preferably English. The first part of that is because it's annoying enough to unambiguously parse one human language much less dozens, and the second part is pure convenience and small-mindedness on my part.

That said, we don't have to buy into diversity or identity or anything else to note that something here is amiss. This is bad allocation of engineering resources.

EDIT:

And yes, one could make the argument that the computer/teleco industry is being produced in Shenzhen, to which I would respond that the intellectual capital was handled by the West. Nintendo hired SGI, Sony IBM. There is certainly a wonderful and burgeoning domestic talent, but the paths were set elsewhere, to the best of my knowledge.

I wonder if the author has submitted a proposal to get the missing glyph for their name added. You don't need to be a member of the consortium to propose adding a missing glyph/updating the standard. The point of the committee as I understand it isn't to be an expert in all forms of writing, but to take the recommendations from scholars/experts and get a working implementation, though more diverse representation of language groups would definitely be a positive change.

http://unicode.org/pending/proposals.html

Also, the CJK unification project sounds horrible.

I really would like to downvote you for your harping about "diversity" whatever you mean by that. I can guess what you mean, as I live in the United States and am exposed to other people who harp similarly thus.

I'm not going to down vote you though, just point out your weird usage of the term and mention that this is about proper information transmission, the foundation of computing and the Internet. So maybe get off your agenda regarding whatever you mean by "diversity" and start to see the people of all types as fellow humans and not actors in your own private psycho-drama.

Han unification makes things really hard for programmers. You end up with code that tries to guess what language a string is in to pick out which character set should be used!

It is an absolute nightmare and a horrid idea.

This is a terrible excuse: the Unicode Consortium should always seek out at least one (if not a group of) native speakers of a language before defining code points for that language. These speakers really should be both native speakers of and experts in the language.

There are countless ways to reach out to Bengali speakers, only one of which is the Indian government - whatever politics governments may play, a technocratic institution should be focused on getting things correct.