I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writers face similar issues. The characters they use to write the name of China or Japan, the ten digits, the characters for year, month, and day in dates, and so many thousands of others in Chinese characters are what they all consider to be the same characters. That is not all characters, but it includes so many that insisting on different code points by language would make a real mess. Hong Kong has many characters that are unique to HK Cantonese. So, should Cantonese have a full set of all Chinese characters that are the "Cantonese characters"? How about Shanghainese, then? Or Hakka? Teochew (Chaozhou) or a dozen Chinese languages? Full, independent sets of all Chinese characters for each? Suppose you accidentally used an input method in HK and wrote the name of some Beijing gov't ministry using characters that looked identical to their Mandarin counterparts but were entirely different codepoints? Now what? You can't find your search term? You mess up the database and have two identical-looking keys?

No, Han unification is not conceptually different from unifying ABCs used by English and Spanish speakers, Cyrillic used by Russians or Serbs, etc., except that there are many more characters, so the boundary between what should be unified and what shouldn't contains more items in the gray zone to cause debate. Having no Han unification at all wouldn't solve all problems, it would create all sorts of absurdity.

A better question is, Are there any native Bengali speakers creating character set standards in Bangladesh or India? If not, why not? If so, did they omit your character?

I ask, because although you prefer to follow the orthodox pattern of blaming white racism for your grievance du jour, the policy of the Unicode Technical Committee for years has been to use the national standards created by the national standards bodies where these scripts are most used as their most important input.

Twenty years ago, I spent a lot of time in these UTC meetings, and when the question arose as to whether to incorporate X-Script into the standard yet, the answer was never whether these cultural imperialists valued, say, Western science fiction fans over irrelevant foreigners, but it was always, "What is the status of X-Script standardization in X-land?" Someone would then report on it. If there was a solid, national standard in place, well-used by local native speakers in local IT applications, it would be fast-tracked into Unicode with little to no modification after verification with the national authorities that they weren't on the verge of changing it. If, however, there was no official, local standard, or several conflicting standards, or a local standard that local IT people had to patch and work around, or whatever, X-Script would be put on a back burner until the local experts figured out their own needs and committed to them.

The complaint in this silly article about tiny Klingon being included before a complete Bengali is precisely because getting Bengali right was more complex and far more important. Apparently, the Bengali experts have not yet established a national standard that is clear, widely implemented, agreed upon by Bengali speakers and that includes the character the author wants in the form he/she wants it, for which he/she inevitably blames "mostly white men."

(Edited to say "he/she", since I don't know which.)

Most non-trivial text-rendering systems need to know the language of the text in order to properly render it. This is not only an issue for Japanese/Chinese but also e.g. English/German with different hyphenation rules[0], different rules for ligatures[1] and different rules/preferences for spacing after punctuation[2]. None of these can sensibly be solved by Unicode.

[0] ‘backen’ (to bake) becomes bak-ken when hyphenated at the end of a line, ‘airlock’ can’t be hyphenated at all between c and k.

[1] ‘Schiff’ (ship) should be rendered with a ligature ff, ‘Dampfflut’ (~ steam flow?) shouldn’t. ‘afferent’ probably should have it.

[2] Single space after ‘.’ and ‘,’ in German, whereas French tends to prefer more space after ‘.’.

For instance, in skiing competitions, the start lists are for some reason made with transcriptions to ASCII. It's quite okay that Schröder becomes Schroeder, but it is less desirable that Söderström becomes Soederstroem and quite infuriating that Hämäläinen becomes Haemaelaeinen. We'd like it to be Hamalainen, just drop the dots.