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I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

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Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#31

Post by rpedroso »

mlmonkey wrote: post #24
rpedroso wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Indian government recognizes 22 languages, not 2. The government has a department dedicated to their support: http://tdil.mit.gov.in Why isn't someone asking that department WTF has it been doing? Added later: and there's also CDAC http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual which has been at it since 1988.

I don't purport to know what the Technology Development for Indian Languages Departments is doing with its time, but perhaps its inefficacy is a signal that speakers of such languages should not need to depend on them for techno-linguistic representation.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#32

Post by rpedroso »

mlmonkey wrote: post #21
a_c_s wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 techno…

That's ridiculous. How can you expect UC to reach out to the 1000s of languages out there? Plus, shouldn't the party who expects to benefit put in the effort? Did you know that the Indian Government has a department for just such a thing, http://tdil.mit.gov.in/ ? What has it been doing all these years? Added later: there's also CDAC http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual . And these are just 2 that I found quickly.

"The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards."

The fact that it is their goal to set the standard for the textual representation of human speech means that they take on that responsibility.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#33

Post by mlmonkey »

shkkmo wrote: post #9
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…

So blame the indian government for any problems with ISCII. The problems with Unicode support for global languages are indeed to be blamed on the Unicord Consortium. Nothing the indian governemnt did prevents the UC from availing themselves of the global knowledge needed to create a good global standard.

do you have any evidence that the UC has actively ignored requests from Bengali speakers? Has any Bengali speaker made proposals to the UC for fixing these issues? If yes, and the UC chose to ignore them, then there is some blame to be assigned with the UC. Otherwise, this is a non-issue.

Take, for example, Tibetan. The number of Tibetan speakers is minuscule compared to, say, Bengali. But still Tibetan has good support, because enough people took an interest in getting it supported and worked with the UC to get it done.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#34

Post by microcolonel »

“Whatever path we take, it’s imperative that the writing system of the 21st century be driven by the needs of the people using it. In the end, a non-native speaker – even one who is fluent in the language – cannot truly speak on behalf the monolingual, native speaker.”

Not sure how the author can simultaneously say this, while criticizing the CJK unification, which makes total sense, and has never been a point of contention in the communities concerned with it.

I regularly work with both Chinese and Japanese texts, and have studied Japanese language for more than five years; more than not opposing CJK unification, I benefit from it greatly. It means that I can search for the same character(yes, the same, I said it) and get results in Japanese, Chinese, and sometimes Korean context without having to consult some sort of unicode etymology resource.

There should not be three codepoints for 中, 日, 力, and most other characters. The simplified and specific post-han forms have their own codepoints anyway, so there is(to my eyes at least) no value in fragmenting instances of the same character.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#35

Post by nothrabannosir »

bbreier wrote: post #13
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…

tangent, but isn't 国 simplified and 國 traditional guó?

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#36

Post by icebraining »

breadbox wrote: post #20
vilhelm_s wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the letter wasn't left out of Unicode; it's actually typed in the article. It's just internally represented as multiple codepoints, much like one of parts of my name (é) may be.

Frankly, this is irrelevant to the actual problem, which is the input system, and which has nothing to do with Unicode. Nothing prevents a single key from typing multiple codepoints at once.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#37

Post by yarper »

I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name ... - by Aditya Mukerjee on March 17th, 2015

What is the glyph missing from this?

I know its not ideal but some uncommon glyphs have always been omitted from charsets, for example ASCII never included http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86, and it was replaced by "ae" in common language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#38

Post by dominotw »

I am an Indian and it shocks me that Indians are still blaming the British after 70 yrs of independence.

Is 70 years of Independence not enough to make your language "first class citizen" ? Ofcourse Bengali is second class language because Bengalis didn't invent the standard.

Can we stop blaming white people for everything. Seriously WTF.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#39

Post by jsmthrowaway »

breadbox wrote: post #20
vilhelm_s wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My first choice as theoretical Quentin wouldn't be "how can I frame this accidental, perhaps even flagrantly disrespectful omission as antiprogressive and dissect the credentials, experience, and ethnicity of the people who made the mistake via culture essay," it would probably be "where do I issue a pull request to fix this mistake or in what way can I help?"

Maybe that's just me. I look forward to the future where any mistake not involving a straight white Anglo-Saxon man or his customs can be built up as antiprogressive agenda, and the best advocacy is taking the people who made them down rather than fixing the problem that is the, you know, problem.

(As an aside, imagine my surprise to see a Model View Culture link on HN given how much MVC absolutely hates and criticizes HN, including a weekly "worst of HN" comment dissection.)

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#40

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]
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