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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

#231

Post by maxlybbert »

Maken wrote: post #197
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…

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" syllab…

That's news to me. Perhaps I'll have better luck finding words like "chancho" in a dictionary; I'll be right to look in the c's!

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#232

Post by vidarh »

eridius wrote: post #222
stevejones wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some languages those accented characters would be different letters, sometimes appearing far away from each other in collation order. In other cases they are basically the same letter. Whereas in Hungarian 'dzs' is a letter.

Different languages can define different collation rules even when they use the same graphemes. For example, in Swedish z < ö, but in German ö < z. Same graphemes, different collation.

And we may even have more than one set of collation rules within the same language.

E.g. Norwegian had two common ways of collating æ,ø,å and their alternative forms ae, oe and aa. Phone books used to collate "ae" with æ, "oe" with ø and "aa" with å, while in other contexts "ae", "oe" and "aa" would often be collated based on their constituent parts. It's a lot less common these days for the pairs to be collated with æøå, but still not unheard of.

Of course it truly becomes entertaining to try to sort out when mixing in "foreign" characters. E.g I would be inclined to collate ö together with ø if collating predominantly Norwegian strings, since ö used to be fairly commonly used in Norway too, but these days you might also find it collated with "o".

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#234

Post by darklajid »

1ris wrote: post #230
darklajid wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it exists. But then again, most systems in use today (as far as I'm aware) would turn a ß into SS, not ẞ. Actually I think I've never seen a ẞ in use, ever. Not once. Now I'm running around testing 'Try $programmingLanguage' services on the net. Try Clojure for example: > (.toUpperCase "ß") "SS"

In Haskell: isLower $ toUpper 'ß' is True. I wonder how many security holes this unexpected behaviour causes.

.Net seems to do the same thing, Javascript (according to jsfiddle) as well. So maybe this is more widespread than I thought (again - I have never seen that character in the wild)?

Java (as in Try Clojure) seems to do the 'expected' SS thing. Trying the golang playground I get even worse:

fmt.Println(strings.ToUpper("ßẞ"))

returns

ßẞ

(yeah, unchanged?)

So, while I agree that you're technically correct (ẞ exists!) I do stick to my ~7 letters list for now.. It seems that's both realistic and usable.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#235

Post by estebank »

frivoal wrote: post #108
estebank wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if the letter Q had been left out of Unicode's Latin alphabet. To properly write my european last name I have to press between 2 and 4 different simultaneous keys, depending on the system. Han unification is beyond misguided, but combining characters is not the problem.

Han unification as a hole is misguided? I'll grant you that some characters which were unified probably shouldn't have been, and maybe some that some that should have been weren't, but what's the argument for the whole thing to be misguided? Should Norwegian A and English A be different Unicode code points just because Norwegian also has Ø, proving that it is a different writing system? You may want to debate whether…

We'll the Turkish i/ı/I/I is I think exactly the example I would have come up with of characters that looks the same as i/I, but should have it's own code point, just like cyrillic characters have their own code points despite looking like latin characters.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#236

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

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…

>There should not be three codepoints for 中, 日, 力, and most other characters

There wouldn't be. Where the characters do not diverge, you don't need separate codepoints, surely?

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#237

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

frivoal wrote: post #187
ptx wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but it seems tricky like it would be tricky to strike exactly the right balance between unifying too much and too little. The arguments for Han unification could have just as well been applied to unifying the Nordic languages – the Swedish Ä is really exactly the same letter as Danish/Norwegian Æ (except that Swedish words never ever use the latter and presumably Danish words never use the former), so it cou…

Ä and Æ are more different from eachother than the characters in Chinese and Japanese which have been merged. They are used for the same thing, they share etymology, but they are not the same letter. By the way, Unicode is about scripts, not languages. If we started distinguishing by language, we might need to start remembering that china doesn't have a single language. Duplicating all those characters again to cover…

> Ä and Æ are more different from eachother than the characters in Chinese and Japanese which have been merged.

> They are used for the same thing, they share etymology, but they are not the same letter.

That second quote applies equally to Ä and Æ.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#238

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

lxe wrote: post #164

> No native English speaker would ever think to try “Greco Unification” and consolidate the English, Russian, German, Swedish, Greek, and other European languages’ alphabets into a single alphabet. This actually is a pretty good idea. Cyrillic, Latin, and other "Greco" scripts share quite a lot of characters. There's no need for both А ( http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0410/index.htm ) and A ( http://www…

Well, it depends. Do you unify those with identical glyphs but different origins? Do you unify only those with identical glyphs and the same origins?

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#239

Post by kijin »

zhemao wrote: post #221
toufka wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems again to be a perfect place for rendering rather than encoding. The english letter 'a' can be rendered as a ring with a tail (the way I handwrite), or a ring with a cap and a tail (the way the font usually renders). Both are the same letter, if rendered differently based on my (contextually sensitive) font.

Except you can still recognize the 'a' as 'a' no matter which way it is rendered. Not so with Chinese characters. For instance, the character for "fly" in simplified (飞) and traditional (飛) look very different. Someone who only learned simplified may not recognize the traditional character as being the same.

Which is exactly why 飞 and 飛 are encoded separately. I don't see any problem with that.
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