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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

#351

Post by ohjesusthatguy »

ohjesusthatguy wrote: post #350
ohjesusthatguy wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My first choice as theoretical Quentin wouldn't be "how can I frame this accidental, perhaps even flagrantly disrespectful omission as antiprogressive and dissect the credentials, experience, and ethnicity of the people who made the mistake via culture essay," it would probably be "where do I issue a pull request to fix this mistake or in what way can I help?" " I could tell you, but I'll need $18,000 first.

I absolutely agree with the down-vote; why didn't you white people pull together and work something out for the white guy that has a reasonable pull request for an encoding of a language in which he probably doesn't ever write? Don't y'all un-niggers pull together?

Just because I'm harsh doesn't mean I don't love you guys :)

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#352

Post by ohjesusthatguy »

ohjesusthatguy wrote: post #351
ohjesusthatguy wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree with the down-vote; why didn't you white people pull together and work something out for the white guy that has a reasonable pull request for an encoding of a language in which he probably doesn't ever write? Don't y'all un-niggers pull together?

Just because I'm harsh doesn't mean I don't love you guys :)

Hey how do I get downvotes? No fair! :) Answer: I could tell you, but you need 2070 karma first :) :)

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#353

Post by estebank »

frivoal wrote: post #290
estebank wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely. So i/ı/I/I do have their own codepoints. But the rest of the letters, which are the same, don't. Just like han unification. Letters which are the same are the same, and those which are not are not, even if they look pretty close.

The thing is that the turkish "i" and "I" don't have their own codepoints, it is the same one as latin "i" and "I", when they should have been their own codepoints representing the same glyphs. That way going from I to ı and from i to İ wouldn't be a locale dependant problem.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#354

Post by garfij »

sdg1 wrote: post #184
chimeracoder wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point in the original comment (and to some extent in the preceding one) was to emphasize that a lot of these issues are at the input method level - we should not have to think about encoding as long as it accurately and unambiguously represent whatever we want it to represent. I might be sympathetic to this, except that keyboard layouts and input (esp. on mobile devices) is an even bigger mess and even more frag…

> except that keyboard layouts and input (esp. on mobile devices) is an even bigger mess and even more fragmented than character encoding. Encoding was in a similar place 10-15 years ago. Almost every publisher in Bengali had their own encoding, font, and keyboard layout - the bigger ones built their own in-house systems, while the smaller ones used systems that were built or maintained by very small operators. To ma…

This has been a fascinating back and forth. Thank you for taking the time to have a comprehensive discussion.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#355

Post by [deleted] »

restalis wrote: post #324
[deleted] wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Although I agree with a lot of what you said, I perceive the last part, your post-scriptum, to be a little bit distorted. The Renaissance had many sources. One of them was the massive intellectual immigration from the crumbling Byzantine Empire, thus serving for much of intellectual works as a bridge over the time (from antiquity to enlightened medieval period) and space (near east to all over the Europe). And it was…

[deleted]

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#356

Post by darklajid »

Argorak wrote: post #312
ptaipale wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not entirely sure if Germans count umlauts as distinct characters or modified versions of the base character. And maybe it is not so important; they still do deserve their own code points. Note BTW that in e.g. Swedish and German alphabets, there are some overlapping non-ASCII characters (ä, ö) and some that are distinct to each language (å, ü). It is important that the Swedish ä and German ä are rendered to the…

Umlauts are not distinct characters, but modifications of existing ones to indicate a sound shift. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28diacritic%29 German has valid transcriptions to their base alphabet for those, e.g "Schreoder" is a valid way to write "Schröder". ß, however, is a separate character that is not listed in the german alphabet, especially because some subgroups don't use it. (e.g. swiss german do…

Two things

1) To avoid confusing readers that don't know German or are used to umlauts: The correct transcription is base-vowel+e (i.e. ö turns to oe - the example given is therefor wrong. Probably just a typo, but still)

2) These transcriptions are lossy. If you see 'oe' in a word, you cannot (always) pronounce it as umlaut. The second e just might indicate that the o in oe is long.

3) ß is a character in the alphabet, as far as I'm aware and as far as the mighty Wikipedia is concerned, as I pointed out above. If you have better sources that claim something else, please share those (I .. am a native speaker, but no language expert. So I'm genuinely curious why you'd think that this letter isn't part of the alphabet).

Fun fact: I once had to revise all the documentation for a project, because the (huge, state-owned) Swiss customer refused perfectly valid German, stating "We don't have that letter here, we don't use it: Remove it".

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#357

Post by microcolonel »

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…

I would like to take a moment to have people recognize that there are differences between the glyphs used for these characters, and some people find this to be a point of contention.

For example, in the case of the text fragment “福祉”, there are three glyph representations for each character. Referenced below is an image demonstrating these three; first is Chinese, second is Korean, third is Japanese. [0] (I left out the Taiwanese etc. because they don't differ in this case from the CN)

The UC have clear rules for this, as explained in their section "Characters, not glyphs", which starts on page 8 of the chapter 2 pdf of the Unicode 7.0 standard. They make the case that codepoints are not for representing stylistic or glyphic distinctions, as seen here, but rather for semantic separations; that is, people still agree that these are the same characters, even if they typeset and write them differently in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese text.

They make cases specifically against a greco-latin unification, and for the CJK unification in Technical Note #26[1]

[0] http://marumie.magnifi.ca:8080/ipfs/QmXDnJUPVtzxVtAQgFkNHwvk... [1] http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn26/

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#358

Post by SiVal »

chimeracoder wrote: post #328
SiVal wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Bengali your first language? 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 crea…

> 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. This is factually incorrect. It seems you missed both the factual point about the Klingon script in the article as well as the broader point which that detail was meant to illustrate. > although you prefer to follow the orthodox pattern o…

versus making native speakers an active and equal part of the actual decision-making process.

As I explained, native speakers are the primary decision makers, and not just any native speakers but whoever the native speakers choose as their own top, native experts when they establish their own national standard. For living, natural languages, you don't get characters into Unicode by buying a seat on the committee and voting for them. You do it by getting those characters into a national standard created by the native-speaking authorities.

So, I repeat: What national standard have your native-speaking authorities created that reflects the choices you claim all native speakers would naturally make if only the foreign oppressors would listen to them? If your answer is that the national standards differ from what you want, then you are blaming the Unicode Technical Committee for refusing to override the native speakers' chosen authorities and claiming this constitutes abuse of native Bengali speakers by a bunch of "mostly white men".

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#359

Post by chimeracoder »

SiVal wrote: post #358
chimeracoder wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is factually incorrect. It seems you missed both the factual point about the Klingon script in the article as well as the broader point which that detail was meant to illustrate. > although you prefer to follow the orthodox pattern o…

versus making native speakers an active and equal part of the actual decision-making process. As I explained, native speakers are the primary decision makers, and not just any native speakers but whoever the native speakers choose as their own top, native experts when they establish their own national standard. For living, natural languages, you don't get characters into Unicode by buying a seat on the committee and…

> As I explained, native speakers are the primary decision makers

No, the ultimate decision makers of Unicode are the voting members of the Unicode Consortium (and its committees).

> For living, natural languages, you don't get characters into Unicode by buying a seat on the committee and voting for them. You do it by getting those characters into a national standard created by the native-speaking authorities

As referenced elsewhere in the comments, there are plenty of decisions that the Unicode Consortium (and its committees) take themselves. Some of these (though not all) take "native-speaking authorities" as an input, but the final decision is ultimately theirs.

There's a very important difference between being made an adviser (having "input") and being a decision-maker, and however much the decision-makers may value the advisers, we can't pretend that those are the same thing.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#360

Post by CWuestefeld »

qntm wrote: post #17

> He proudly announces that there are ‘no fewer than 147 Indian dialects’ – a pathetically inaccurate count. (Today, India has 57 non-endangered and 172 endangered languages, each with multiple dialects – not even counting the many more that have died out in the century since My Fair Lady took place) So, how many were there really? At the time, I mean.

The meanings of "language" and "dialect" are surprisingly tied up in politics. Aside from what various folks in India speak, consider...

In China, too, we say that people in different regions speak different dialects: the national standard Mandarin; Shanghainese; Cantonese; Taiwanese; Fukanese; and others. Someone who speaks only one of these languages will be entirely unable to speak to someone who speaks only a different one. I'm friends with a couple, the guy being from Hong Kong and the girl being from Shanghai; at home, their common tongue is English. So in what way can these different ways of speaking be considered mere dialects?

But on the other side of the coin, there are the languages of Sweden and Norway. We like to call these different languages, but a speaker of one language can readily communicate with a speaker of the other. Wouldn't these be better considered dialects of the same language? I was recently on vacation in Mexico, and at the resort there was a member of the entertainment staff who came from South Africa, a native speaker of Afrikaans. She told me that she recently helped out some guests who came from Dutch, and spoke poor English (which is usually the lingua franca when traveling). Apparently Afrikaans and Dutch are so close that she was able to translate Spanish or English into Afrikaans for them, and they were able to understand that through skills in Dutch. Again, Afrikaans and Dutch seem to be dialects of the same language (and, I think, Flemish as well).

I think the answer is that language is commonly used as a proxy for, or excuse for, dividing nations. So if you want to claim that China is all one nation, you have to claim that those different ways of speaking are just dialects of the same language. Conversely, to claim separate national identities for Norwegians and Swedes, we have to say that those are different languages.

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