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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

#371

Post by SiVal »

chimeracoder wrote: post #359
SiVal wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 refe…

You claim that native Bengali speakers on the UTC would have designed the character set your way, the real native speaker way, instead of the bad design produced by these "mostly white men".

But the character set WAS designed by native speakers, by experts chosen not by the UTC but by the native speaking authorities themselves. The UTC merely verified that these native speaking experts were still satisfied with their own standard after using it for a while, and when they said they were, the UTC adopted it.

You go on about how the real issue is the authority of these white men and how the native speakers are restricted to a minor role as mere advisers, and yet the native speakers, as is usually the case, had all the authority they needed to create the exact character set that THEY wanted and get it adopted into Unicode. That's the way the UTC wants to use its authority in almost all cases of living languages.

Unfortunately for your argument, these native speakers didn't need any more authority to get the character set they wanted into Unicode. They got it. You just don't like their choices, but you prefer to blame it on white men with authority.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#372

Post by Argorak »

darklajid wrote: post #356
Argorak wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alphab…

1) It's a typo, yes. Thanks! 2) Well, they are lossy in the sense that pronunciation is context-sensitive. The number of cases where you actually turn the word into another word is very small: http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/german2/stemmer.html has a discussion. 3) You are right, I'm wrong. ß, ä, ö, ü are considered part of the alphabet. It's not tought in school, though (at least not in mine).

Thanks a lot for making the effort and fact-checking better then I did there :).

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#373

Post by ramgorur »

I can type anything in bengali without any issue -- হঠাৎ, কিংকর্তব্যবিমূঢ়, সংশপ্তক, বর্ষাকাল...

Not sure about other "second class" languages, this open source phonetic (unicode) keyboard is extremely popular in bangladesh, and everyone does all sorts of bengali stuffs with it --

https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#374

Post by iopq »

claudius wrote: post #327
iopq wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cyrillic ПФ vs Greek ΠΦ? Here's Cyrillic lower case: пф Here's Greek lower case: πφ in some fonts the pi would be rendered with a longer bar on top, but you just showed why it's a bad idea: I would want to be able to discuss Greek in Russian on a forum, but this would not be possible because all the glyphs in lowercase would look Russian

The forms 𝜙 and 𝜑 of "lowercase phi" to have different codepoints makes perfect sense to me. That doesn’t mean that upper-case variants of these can’t share a codepoint. As presented elsewhere in this thread, "X.toUpper().toLower()" doesn’t have to be "X". The same holds for "B → b" and "B → β" depending on the context. It’s just that the savings from such a unification would be far smaller due to the smaller sizes…

OK, but you still have a problem because I want to use the same font for Greek and Russian. What if my font is CURSIVE?

Russian and Greek have different cursive forms. You might unify κ and к, but actually the cursive form of κ looks like a Roman u.

So really if this were to happen you'd have "Russian" fonts and "Greek" fonts. Kind of like how Japanese and Chinese have to use different fonts for their languages.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#375

Post by jedanbik »

SiVal wrote: post #322
Manishearth wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with your point, but note that the author is male (well, the name is a commonly male one). It's a bit telling that folks in the software industry[1] seem to assume that techies are male (a priori), but those who write articles of this kind are female. Not blaming you for it, but it's something you should try to be conscious about and fix. [1] I've been guilty of this myself, though usually in cases whe…

I had a female coworker by that name, so your assumption that I just assume that people who write articles like this are female and need to have my consciousness raised to "fix" my unconscious sexism is something you should try to be more conscious of and try to fix. However, I clearly do need to question my assumption that since this was a female name before, it's a female name now, so I should change it to "he/she"…

Or they.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#376

Post by elatahualpa »

nova wrote: post #188
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…

> ch, ll, ñ, and rr are all considered separate letters In Spanish "rr" has never been considered as a single letter. "Ch" and "ll" used to be, but not anymore. Ñ is, of course.

I'm afraid that I have to add my voice to the list of people raised in Spanish speaking countries prior to the 90s who was VERY clearly taught that rr was a separate letter.

This is what I recall from my childhood: http://img.docstoccdn.com/thumb/orig/113964108.png

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#377

Post by Navarr »

ptaipale wrote: post #291
toufka wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, as I'm not sure when that would actually happen in real life (in Chinese). Generally in mainland China , the ROC would always be rendered with 国, even officially [1]. And in Taiwan the PRC would be rendered with 國 [2]. It gets a bit weirder in Japanese where the word is distinctly not the same - one is a traditional version (proper noun) of the other and you could imagine a text using both (William vs Wilhel…

That is true, mainland China writes "中华民国". But I still do want to be able to write texts that are like this discussion: mainly in English, but contain fragments in Chinese, and so that I can use both the traditional and simplified characters. And it also makes total sense to me that 日本 is Japan, both in Japanese and Chinese, using the exact same Unicode characters.

If it's up to font rendering, you would specify the language tag for each of those individually which would render the appropriate font (as you are writing that country's name in its language).

Though that's far more difficult for the laman, and markdown certainly doesn't seem to have any language markers.

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