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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

#301

Post by [deleted] »

MichaelGG wrote: post #144
dominotw wrote: post #38

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.

Was British rule actually a net negative, in retrospect? Have there been studies done using objective criteria (not emotional) over counties that were colonies versus ones that weren't? I suppose you can't really quantify the value of people that were destroyed by colonization, but you can look at the current population. Also I just gotta wonder: suppose European or other relatively simple-to-encode languages didn't…

[deleted]

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#302

Post by 4bpp »

I'd imagine that from the point of view of a Unicode consortium member, the question as to whether to include a particular Bengali glyph some argued to be obsolete looks more like "should we lower the threshold for what characters in a language are considered deserving of a separate codepoint, potentially exposing ourselves to a deluge of O(#codepoints/#characters per language) requests for obscure variant characters until we actually run out of them", whereas the question as to whether to include a sign for poop in the end boils down to "can we spare O(1) codepoints to prove to the world that we are not humourless fascists". The particular decision in this case might well be ill-informed, but I think any judgement that the Unicode Consortium is engaging in cultural supremacism (as opposed to doing the usual thing of wanting anglo-american capitalist money) is somewhat far-fetched.

The right solution, I think, would be to replace Unicode with a truly intrinsically variable-length standard such as an unbounded UTF-8 - many of the arguments that were fielded in favour of having the option of fixed-width encodings seem to have melted away now that almost everything that interfaces with users has a layer of high-level glue code, naive implementations of strings have been deemed harmful to security and even ostensibly "embedded" platforms can get away with Java. Rather than having an overwhelmed committee of American industrialists decide over the faith of every single codepoint, then, they could simply allocate a prefix to every catalogued writing system and defer the rest to non-technical authorities whose suggested lists would only require basic rubber-stamp sanity-checking.

> "You can't write your name in your native language, but at least you can tweet your frustration with an emoji face that's the same shade of brown as yours!"

This seems fairly characteristic of the apparent belief of social justice activists - and I can't imagine that Unicode's inclusion of skin colours would be a result of anything other than pressure by the same - that they can improve the whole world with remedies conceived against the background of US American race/identity politics.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#304

Post by minusSeven »

MichaelGG wrote: post #144
dominotw wrote: post #38

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.

Was British rule actually a net negative, in retrospect? Have there been studies done using objective criteria (not emotional) over counties that were colonies versus ones that weren't? I suppose you can't really quantify the value of people that were destroyed by colonization, but you can look at the current population. Also I just gotta wonder: suppose European or other relatively simple-to-encode languages didn't…

All this is out of context and has nothing to do with what OP talks about.

About what you are talking about, it is a fact that India was the richest countries in the world before British colonised it, and after British left it was one of poorest.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#305

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #301
MichaelGG wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was British rule actually a net negative, in retrospect? Have there been studies done using objective criteria (not emotional) over counties that were colonies versus ones that weren't? I suppose you can't really quantify the value of people that were destroyed by colonization, but you can look at the current population. Also I just gotta wonder: suppose European or other relatively simple-to-encode languages didn't…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#306

Post by anon4 »

mbessey wrote: post #261
krakensden wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of your examples are solveable by the Unicode consortium, who are not the god-emperors of fonts (nor would you want them to be).

I respectfully disagree. If Japanese ideograms and Chinese ideograms actually used different code points (i.e. no "Han unification"), then the problem wouldn't exist - the phone could trivially use a Japanese font for Japanese text, and a Chinese font for Chinese text.

But.. you already posted a solution to your problem - use chinese font for chinese and japanese font for japanese. There is no problem. I mean, you would also presumably use a western font for latin and another separate font for cyrillic, since japanese fonts universally have absolutely dreadful kerning on latin (and often omit cyrillic entirely).

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#307

Post by enupten »

dominotw wrote: post #177
MichaelGG wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was British rule actually a net negative, in retrospect? Have there been studies done using objective criteria (not emotional) over counties that were colonies versus ones that weren't? I suppose you can't really quantify the value of people that were destroyed by colonization, but you can look at the current population. Also I just gotta wonder: suppose European or other relatively simple-to-encode languages didn't…

It is really hard to quantify something like that. While British siphoned off large amounts of natural resources and often caused widespread famines in India. They also gave us western democracy, education in western science,access to all the western knowledge.

You speak as though, these things wouldn't have come without the British; I'm sure Japan today is a poor backwards country, for they weren't blessed with the act of "civilizing" by the cross.

Pah!

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#308

Post by elFarto »

jdmichal wrote: post #288
e12e wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Norwegian (for æ). We have æ/Æ and ø/Ø (distinct, in theory, from the symbol for the empty set, btw), while å/Å used to be written aa/AA a long time ago (but is obviously not a result of combining two a's). Swedish uses ö/Ö for essentially ø/Ø, ä/Ä for æ/Æ. And both of those I can only easily type by combining the dot-dot, with o/O, a/A because my Norwegian keyboard layout has key for/labelled øæå, not öäå. For J…

To be fair, proper codepoint processing is a pain even in Java, which was created back when Unicode was in 16-bit mode. Now that it's extended to 32-bits, proper Unicode string looping looks something like this: for(int i = 0; i

Actually, that's not correct, and it's the exact same mistake I made when using that API. codePointAt returns the codepoint at index i, where i is measured in 16-bit chars, which means you could index into the middle of a surrogate pair.

The correct version is:

  for (int i = 0; i
Java 8 seems to have acquired a codePoints() method on the CharSequence interface which seems to do the same thing.

But this just adds to the fact, proper Unicode string processing is a pain :).

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#309

Post by anon4 »

zhemao wrote: post #247
kijin wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, but other characters that also look different are merged. Here's an example: http://www.tofugu.com/2012/04/04/the-sorry-state-of-japanese... That's the character for "cold". If you showed me (a Chinese speaker) the Japanese or Korean variant, I would have no idea what it meant.

Encoding those as the same code point makes sense. On the other hand, just the codepoint is obviously not enough on its own for rendering the glyph. The Unicode consortium seem not to care about the actual rendering part of the whole stack and are happy just defining the low-level bits. But then why do we have skin colour coding for emoji and no language coding for CJK glyphs? The entire thing is a mess, but heaping another pile of standards on top of it will make it even more of a mess, I'm afraid.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#310

Post by EdiX »

josephschmoe wrote: post #56

Am I the only person who thought unifying the Greco-Roman language characters actually sounds like a good idea?

It would be impossible to do. Even back in 1991 when unicode was conceived almost all the encodings in use were ASCII-compatible.

For languages that would be affected by a greco-unification that meant the encodings that were in use before unicode had both the latin script and their "national" script.

Implementing greco-unification in unicode would mean that round-trip lossless conversion (from origin encoding to unicode back into origin encoding) would be impossible, greatly limiting unicode's adoption.

No such problem existed with han characters, in fact JIS X 0208 (the character set used for Shift-JIS) did a very similar thing to unicode's han unification.

In absence of backwards compatibility problems I would be in favor of greco-unification too.

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