I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode • Hacker News Board

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#11

Post by beat » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 5:55 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #2

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, bec…

Bengali is the seventh most widely spoken language in the world, with more native speakers than Russian. That's hardly a "niche language".

And, as pg has pointed out, making the computer industry English-centric and America-centric is greatly limiting us. Intelligence and will to power are equally distributed across the globe. But institutional barriers to success are not. This is a classic example of an institutional barrier, and it makes all of us poorer.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#12

Post by theon144 » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #8

angersock wrote: post #2

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, bec…

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.

Isn't the idea technically that the code shouldn't even have to guess? Why isn't this the case?

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#13

Post by bbreier » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

nemo wrote: post #4

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 l…

The author's explanation of what characters Chinese, Japanese, and Korean share is very limited. All three languages use Chinese characters in written language to varying extents, and in some cases the differences begin significantly less than a century ago. Though there are cases where the same Chinese character represented in Japanese writing is different from how it is represented in Traditional Chinese writing (i.e. 国, Japanese version only because I don't have Chinese installed on this PC), which could be different still from how it is represented in Simplified Chinese, there are also many instances where the character is identical across all three languages (i.e. 中). Although I am not privy to the specifics of the CJK unification project, identifying these cases and using the same character for them doesn't sound unreasonable.

Edit- To be clear, Korean primarily uses Hangul, which basically derives jack and shit from the Chinese alphabet, and Japanese uses a mixture of the Chinese alphabet, and two alphabets that sort-of kind-of owe some of their heritage to the Chinese alphabet, but look nothing like it. If they are talking about unifying these alphabets, then they are out of their minds.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#14

Post by psychometry » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

nemo wrote: post #4

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 l…

I found it extremely annoying that he doesn't even say specifically what the problem with his name is. So there's a letter that's unavailable? Which letter?

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#15

Post by theon144 » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

I don't understand; I don't feel like character combination using the zero width joiner is on the same level as 13375p34k. It looks like the character just doesn't have a separate code-point, but is instead a composite, but still technically "reachable" from within Unicode, no?

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#16

Post by gerbal » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

nemo wrote: post #4

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 l…

Holy cow CJK unification is a terrible idea. Maybe if it originated from the CJK governments, it might be an OK idea, but the idea of a Western multinationals trying to save Unicode space by disregarding the distinctness of a whole language group is idiotic.

The fundamental roll of an institution like the Unicode Consortium is to be descriptive, not prescriptive. If there is a human script, passing certain, low, low thresholds, it should be eligible to be included in its distinct whole in Unicode.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#17

Post by qntm » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 6:03 PM UTC

> He proudly announces that there are ‘no fewer than 147 Indian dialects’ – a pathetically inaccurate count. (Today, India has 57 non-endangered and 172 endangered languages, each with multiple dialects – not even counting the many more that have died out in the century since My Fair Lady took place)

So, how many were there really? At the time, I mean.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#18

Post by rpedroso » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

mlmonkey wrote: post #5

I get the author's point, but assigning blame to the Unicode Consortium is incorrect. The Indian government dropped the ball here. They went their separate way with "ISCII" and other such misguided efforts, instead of cooperating with UC. To me, the UC is just a platform. The government is the de facto safeguarder of the people's interests; if it drops the ball, it should be taken to task, not the provider of the pla…

There are over 100 languages spoken in India, many of which are not even Hindustani in origin. The Indian government primarily recognizes two languages: Hindi and Urdu. Additionally, Urdu is the official national language of Pakistan.

Are speakers of Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, etc. really supposed to depend on the Indian government to assure that the Unicode Consortium supports their native tongues? What about speakers of Hindustani/Indo-Iranian languages who do not live in India?

I don't think it's right to pin the blame on India and tell Bengali speakers that they're barking up the wrong tree. If the Unicode Consortium purports to set the standard for the encoding of human speech, then it seems to me that the responsibility should fall squarely on them.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#19

Post by makomk » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #2

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, bec…

Yeah, there's only one minor problem with the article: those emoji symbols it bemoans were added for the Japanese market. Western and English-language support for them was very much an afterthought. What's more, the reason they were added was because Japanese mobile providers were already offering emoji support through various non-standard and not entirely compatible encodings.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#20

Post by breadbox » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 6:06 PM UTC

vilhelm_s wrote: post #7

nemo wrote: post #4

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 l…

It sounds like the glyph is in unicode already, but expressed using combining characters?

Imagine if the letter Q had been left out of Unicode's Latin alphabet. The argument against it is that it can be written with a capital O combined with a comma. (That's going to play hell with naive sorting algorithms, of course, but oh well.) Oh, and also imagine your name is Quentin.