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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

#191

Post by eloisant »

microcolonel wrote: post #34

“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…

Actually yes, the CJK unification is a problem for many people, including me when I want to read Japanese on a phone bought in Europe.

Example 1. Typically, any time you want to mix the 2 languages you're getting in trouble.

Let's say you write a textbook for Chinese people to learn Japanese as a second language. Or a research article in Japanese citing old Chinese literature.

In your text, you'll have to mark specifically which part are in Japanese and which part are in Chinese and use different font for them. If you don't, the characters look wrong.

Example 2. Most phone software don't switch font for languages, so they pick one. Let's say you buy a Japanese phone, it's a Japanese font everywhere. For some reason on a Samsung or Motorola phone bought in Europe, it's a Chinese font everywhere and it looks ugly for Japanese. Wasn't Unicode supposed to be universal, and allow you to read in any language with a device bought anywhere?

On the other hand, I don't think the "I can't write my name" is really a problem for Japanese people, or at least it's not a Unicode problem. Some people have rare characters in their names. They accept and understand not being able to type their name on a computer and having to settle for a close characters. Unicode actually provided more characters than previous Japanese-only encodings like JIS so there are people who could write their name thanks to Unicode.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#192

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

darklajid wrote: post #158
maxlybbert wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > It seems like you're trying to single out combining pairs as "less legitimate" when they're extensively used in the standard. > I'm saying that Unicode only does it in English where it makes semantic sense to a native English speaker. Well, combining characters almost never come up in English. The best I can think of would be the use of cedillas, diaereses, and acute accents in words like façade, coördinate and…

I'm coming from a German background and I sympathize with the author. German has 4 (7 if you consider cases) non-ASCII characters: äüöß(and upper-case umlauts). All of these are unique, well-defined codepoints. That's not related to composing on a keyboard. In fact, although I'm German I'm using the US keyboard layout and HAD to compose these characters now. But I wouldn't need to and the result is a single codepoint…

> German has 4 (7 if you consider cases) non-ASCII characters: äüöß(and upper-case umlauts). All of these are unique, well-defined codepoints.

German does not consider "ä", "ö" and "ü" letters. Our alphabet has 26 letters none of which are the ones you mentioned. In fact, if you go back in History it becomes even clearer that those letters used to be ligatures in writing.

They still are collated as the basic letters the represent, even if they sound different. That we use the uncomposed representation in Unicode usually, is merely a historical artifact because of iso-8859-1 and others, not because it logically makes sense.

When you used an old typewriter you usually did not have those keys either, you composed them.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#193

Post by vilhelm_s »

austinz wrote: post #128
Tomte wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antiqua, Fractura, Schwabacher, Textura and all those other charming variants of writing European languages don't have seperate code points for all those presentational variations. Do we white Western men happen to discriminate against ourselves?

The difference between traditional and simplified Chinese characters is more than simply different fonts. Part of the difficulty is that some simplified characters map to multiple traditional characters, which means that converting from one to the other may be lossy. There's also the Japanese equivalent of simplified characters (shinjitai), many of which differ from their Chinese counterparts, as well as characters t…

Simplified and traditional characters have different unicode codepoints. Japanese and mainland simplifications have different codepoints when they differ, and Japanese-only characters of course have their own codepoints.

The argument is about characters like 冷. It is given a single codepoint, but Chinese typefaces draw the bottommost stroke diagonally, and Japanese typefaces tend to draw it vertically. (When writing it by hand, both versions are acceptable in Japanese also, http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q105... )

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#194

Post by 1ris »

darklajid wrote: post #158
maxlybbert wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > It seems like you're trying to single out combining pairs as "less legitimate" when they're extensively used in the standard. > I'm saying that Unicode only does it in English where it makes semantic sense to a native English speaker. Well, combining characters almost never come up in English. The best I can think of would be the use of cedillas, diaereses, and acute accents in words like façade, coördinate and…

I'm coming from a German background and I sympathize with the author. German has 4 (7 if you consider cases) non-ASCII characters: äüöß(and upper-case umlauts). All of these are unique, well-defined codepoints. That's not related to composing on a keyboard. In fact, although I'm German I'm using the US keyboard layout and HAD to compose these characters now. But I wouldn't need to and the result is a single codepoint…

8 letters actually. 'ẞ' was added quite a while later.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#195

Post by zhemao »

outworlder wrote: post #94

> He proudly announces that there are ‘no fewer than 147 Indian dialects’ – a pathetically inaccurate count. Wow. How can a country function like this? Is everyone proficient in their native language plus a 'common' one, or are all interactions supposed to be translated inside the same country? Regardless of historical and cultural value, if that's the case, it seems... inefficient. I do realize that there are more c…

India has two "official languages" used across the country in business, government, and education: Hindi and English. There are also more widely used regional languages recognized by state governments, such as Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi, and the author's native Bengali. Educated Indians are usually multilingual, speaking Hindi, which they learn at school, and one or more regional languages.

This is not a unique situation. Every country with a large enough area and a long enough history has a vast array of minority languages and dialects. North America is just different because it was settled relatively recently and the indigenous population was almost entirely wiped out.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#196

Post by zhemao »

beat wrote: post #11
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 institutiona…

It's also the national language of Bangladesh. Once a language has become the official language of a recognized country it can hardly be considered a "niche" language.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#197

Post by Maken »

maxlybbert wrote: post #148
chimeracoder wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unicode makes extensive use of combining characters for european languages, for example to produce diacritics: ìǒ or even for flag emoji. But it doesn't, for example say that a lowercase "b" is simply "a lowercase 'l' followed by an 'o' followed by an invisible joiner", because no native English speaker thinks of the character "b" as even remotely related to "lo" when reading and writing. > It seems like you're try…

> > It seems like you're trying to single out combining pairs as "less legitimate" when they're extensively used in the standard. > I'm saying that Unicode only does it in English where it makes semantic sense to a native English speaker. Well, combining characters almost never come up in English. The best I can think of would be the use of cedillas, diaereses, and acute accents in words like façade, coördinate and…

Spanish speaker here. "ch" and "ll" being separate letters has been discussed for a long time and finally the decision was that they weren't separate letters but a combination of two [1]. Meanwhile, "ñ" stands as a letter of its own.

Accented vowels aren't considered different letters in Spanish because they affect the word they are in rather than the letter, as they serve to indicate which one is the "strong" syllable in a word. From a Spanish view of point, "a" and "á" are exactly the same letter.

[1] http://www.rae.es/consultas/exclusion-de-ch-y-ll-del-abeceda...

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#198

Post by _0nac »

afarrell wrote: post #23
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…

But then consider the implementation path to fixing the problem for a minority linguistic group being deliberately repressed by their government--It would require blood. If there is some alternate process to work with the UC directly, that could be better but it puts the UC in the position of judging a linguistic group's claims for legitimacy. I agree that this refutes claims that the UC was negligent, but we can sti…

Unicode has excellent Tibetan support, despite that language and its script being notoriously difficult to work with.

Also, Bengali is not just a major language in India, but the national language of an entire country (Bangladesh) with 100m+ people. It really is almost entirely the fault of the Bangladeshi and West Bengali authorities if they can't get their shit together enough to submit a decent proposal to Unicode.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#199

Post by afarrell »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #173
afarrell wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then consider the implementation path to fixing the problem for a minority linguistic group being deliberately repressed by their government--It would require blood. If there is some alternate process to work with the UC directly, that could be better but it puts the UC in the position of judging a linguistic group's claims for legitimacy. I agree that this refutes claims that the UC was negligent, but we can sti…

In specific or in general? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary An increasing corpus of children's literature is printed in Cherokee syllabary today to meet the needs of Cherokee students in the Cherokee language immersion schools in Oklahoma and North Carolina. In 2010, a Cherokee keyboard cover was developed by Roy Boney, Jr. and Joseph Erb, facilitating more rapid typing in Cherokee and now used by stud…

In specific. I'm familiar with the rigin of the Cherokee Syllabary in general, though HN would probably find it enlightening.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#200

Post by zhemao »

volune wrote: post #165

get your hundreds of millions of native speakers off their asses and solve the problem! the current internet is in roman glyphs because that's what all the people doing the work speak!

Given the number of Indians working in the software field, I think it's safe to say that there are quite a few Bengali speakers "doing the work" to keep the internet running. Actually, I'd posit that the majority of programmers are not native English speakers.
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