Minoan script and Mormon Deseret are in there because somebody stepped up.
I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
61–70 of 377 posts
Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
#62Wait, "ত + ্ + = ৎ" is nothing like "\ + / + \ + / = W". The Bengali script is (mostly) an abugida. Ie, consonants have an inherent vowel (/ɔ/ in the case of Bengali), which can be overriden with a diacritic representing a different vowel. To write /t/ in Bengali, you combine the character for /tɔ/, "ত", with the "vowel silencing diacritic" to remove the /ɔ/, " ্". As it happens, for "ত", the addition of the diacr…
I'm a bit confused too. There's a principled argument in Unicode for when a glyph gets its own codepoint vs when it's considered sufficient to use a combining form. I don't know Bengali at all so can't comment on this case, although given the character now is in Unicode I guess the argument changed over time. Somewhere buried in the Unicode Consortium notes is an explicit case for the inclusion / exclusion of this character, it'd be interesting to find it.
Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 institutiona…
Right, but some languages are insanely complex to implement. It might be a better idea to teach English to people around the globe rather than cater to every individual need (which will still leave people unable to communicate across languages). I'm not saying other languages should go away -- but the world would also benefit from having a "universal" language, which is more or less English at this point (Mandarin is…
It's one thing to say English will be the international language of trade and commerce. It's another thing altogether to say we won't bother making character sets that represent other languages, because it's too hard.
Since when has "too hard" ever stopped an engineer? That should be catnip for us!
Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
#64I 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.
Hebrew (and I'd guess Arabic and other right-to-left languages) work rather badly in Unicode when it comes to bidirectional rendering; however, to the extent that it's a result of Israeli/Egyptian/Saudi/etc. companies and/or governments failing to pay $18K (the figure from TFA) to pay for the consortium membership, I kinda blame them and not the consortium. I mean, it's not a whole lot of money, even for a smallish company, not to mention a biggish state.
Also this bit was just amazing: "It took half a century to replace the English-only ASCII with Unicode, and even that was only made possible with an encoding that explicitly maintains compatibility with ASCII, allowing English speakers to continue ignoring other languages."
Seriously? Nobody forces anyone to use UTF-8, and even if it were the only encoding available - by how much the cost of these extra bytes reduces the standard of living in non-English-speaking countries, exactly?
It is in fact unfortunate that the pile of poo is standardized while characters from languages spoken by hundreds of millions are not, however. A pity that a good and surprising (to some) point was mixed with all that "white men" business.
Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
#65Am I the only person who thought unifying the Greco-Roman language characters actually sounds like a good idea?
Yeah, I thought that "No native English speaker would ever think to try “Greco Unification”" was a poor argument. In seems like a reasonable idea.
Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> It's just internally represented as multiple codepoints
And in fact it is not, and even in the article it is U+09CE. One codepoint. If his input method irks him, he's as free to tweak it as I am to switch to Dvorak.
Also folks, there's no "CJK unification" project. It's Han unification. Han characters are Han characters, just like Latin characters are Latin characters. Just because German has ß and Danish has Ø doesn't mean A isn't a Latin character and not, say, a French one. Not to get all Ayn Rand-y, but A is A is U+0041 in all Western European/Latin alphabets. It makes sense for 中国 and 日本to have the same encoding in Chinese and Japanese.
Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Nor is it unreasonable to "unify" Latin, Greek and Cyrilic: Cyrillic ПФ vs Greek ΠΦ Cyrillic АВ vs Latin AB Obviously using ω for w (as he does) is stupid, but his reducto-ad-absurdum is not particularly absurd.
Unicode kind of does this already with dotless 'i'; capital 'ı' and lowercase 'İ' are represented as regular latin 'I' and 'i' respectively, despite being semantically different letters.
Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
#68“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 con…
> [...] CJK unification[...] has never been a point of contention in the communities concerned with it. I am not very familar with the CJK unification project so take my points with a grain of salt. > more than not opposing CJK unification, I benefit from it greatly. I think think that is a different point of view. Isn't it? You are seeing your benefit whereas the author is seeing his. Here's an alternative solution:…
The example characters expressed: 日、中、力 however are written the same way in both Chinese and Japanese from my understanding. (Albeit, I studied Japanese).
There are admittedly variations which should be done separately, however unification of visually identical glyphs is a "good thing" imho
Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
#69I 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.
Hebrew (and I'd guess Arabic and other right-to-left languages) work rather badly in Unicode when it comes to bidirectional rendering; however, to the extent that it's a result of Israeli/Egyptian/Saudi/etc. companies and/or governments failing to pay $18K (the figure from TFA) to pay for the consortium membership, I kinda blame them and not the consortium. I mean, it's not a whole lot of money, even for a smallish c…
> Hebrew (and I'd guess Arabic and other right-to-left languages) work rather badly in Unicode when it comes to bidirectional rendering; however, to the extent that it's a result of Israeli/Egyptian/Saudi/etc. companies and/or governments failing to pay $18K (the figure from TFA) to pay for the consortium membership
I'm sorry? How does this have anything to do with encoding, versus software toolkits? Unicode and encoding generally has little to nothing to do with input methods or rendering, and if you can explain why Unicode in particular works better in one direction I am genuinely curious.
> It is in fact unfortunate that the pile of poo is standardized while characters from languages spoken by hundreds of millions are not, however
I don't think in 2015 Unicode lacks codepoints for any glyph in regular usage by hundreds of millions. OP has not cited any; the one he explicitly complains of was in fact added in 2005.
Before someone says Chinese, that's a bit more like citing some archaic English word missing from a spellchecker. I am skeptical that there is a Han character missing from Unicode that >> 1 million people recognize much less use on a regular basis.
Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
#70I 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 has been overly aggressive about merging some characters, but the basic principle is not as flawed as it is some times (as in this article) made to sound. The vast majority of Japanese and Chinese characters are not only similar, they are identical. Not all are. Some are clearly different characters deriving from a common historical root, and should not be unified. Sometimes, when characters are a bit different, it is a matter of font. Out of the tends of thousands of characters used by these languages, it is not surprising that mistakes have been made, and yes, han unification has been a bit too far reaching. But not unifying at all would have been much worse. You don't want a in German and a in English to be different letters just because Helvetica and Baskerville look different.
Also, since CJK languages are comfortable with having an unbounded set of letters to work from, they tend to be comfortable with declaring every odd thing a separate letter. Witness the mess that half-width katakana is. Or notice that the origin of most emoji is not in the disregard of white old men for "lesser" languages, but comes from importing existing characters from Japanese encodings.
Which also hints at one more factor. Historically, and still very much to this day, Japan has been much more active in standardization bodies than most other non western countries. Unsurprisingly, Japanese is much better supported by modern software than many other non western languages.