Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The New Wave of Indian Type

design.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 190 posts

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#111

Post by murukesh_s »

mantas wrote: post #105
vvillena wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment that happens, that language would start diverging again. You have to unify culture in order to unify language, and that doesn't sound as good anymore. Settling on a "common" or "business" language, though, is entirely possible, and has been done many times in history. No language ever encompassed the whole world, and if one language has it's English, right now. Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, French, English, Spa…

Point in case - proto Indo European language. It's clear most of European languages (except pre-Indo-European, like Finnish, Estonian, Basque..) have common parent language. For example, look at numbers. All those languages have awfully familiar numbers. If you speak one language, you can recognise most numbers in other languages rather easily. Yet they evolved into very different languages in different regions.

I think numbering system is a recent introduction to European languages - adopted from India in 10th century or so.. but some other words have similarity like maatha- mother, pithaa- father etc!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu–Arabic_numeral_system

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#113

Post by davelab6 »

Tomte wrote: post #24
Something1234 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't font files be compressed, as that would just be using a dictionary which I believe that GZip already does.

They are compressed. Do you perchance mean "dynamically loaded, on demand"? Because there's no standard for it. Because – as usual – "good enough for Western audiences".

The css standard for "dynamically loaded, on demand" is Unicode Range.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#114

Post by yorwba »

murukesh_s wrote: post #111
mantas wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point in case - proto Indo European language. It's clear most of European languages (except pre-Indo-European, like Finnish, Estonian, Basque..) have common parent language. For example, look at numbers. All those languages have awfully familiar numbers. If you speak one language, you can recognise most numbers in other languages rather easily. Yet they evolved into very different languages in different regions.

I think numbering system is a recent introduction to European languages - adopted from India in 10th century or so.. but some other words have similarity like maatha- mother, pithaa- father etc! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu–Arabic_numeral_system

The written numerals are relatively recent, but the words for numbers are much older and still very similar across languages.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#115

Post by davelab6 »

rspeer wrote: post #63
elcapitan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glyphs in fonts already make use of composite features (ü can be u + ¨, just the coordinates of the references). But readability of type can be complex, so I don't know if that's a viable solution to compose large-nonwestern fonts in a way that is natural to read. There may be very subtle differences that force the designer to decompose the parts and make modifications.

Ah! Knowing that, I bet that someone _could_ make a CJK font optimized for file size, which includes radicals by reference. It wouldn't work in every case, because radicals change size and strokes shift to make room for other strokes. In cases where the same radical appears in the same place, it seems like it would help. But maybe that's not enough of a benefit unless there's also a way to say "okay you need to use t…

The www.glyphsapp.com and www.fontlab.com font editor apps have "smart components" which do this. Sadly the OpenType format is developed very conservatively by Microsoft so these aren't part of the only widely supported font format today, despite recent additions to the format of run time interpolation technology.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#116

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

jacobolus wrote: post #110
echevil wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any part of your comment being correct. First of all, "Mandarin" is spoken not only in China mainland, but also the standard in Singapore and Taiwan. It was a creation by the Republic of China (which later became Taiwan government) back in 1923, long before the current Chinese government came into power. Children use Mandarin in school because they have to learn it to be able to communicate with people co…

The language we call Mandarin has been the native language of some parts of northern China for thousands of years, and was certainly not “created” any time recently. Some people speaking dialects of that language migrated to other parts of China. But there are various other languages natively spoken elsewhere in the country. Singapore is a cosmopolitan port city, there are several Chinese languages spoken there, and…

> I’m not sure about Singapore but in Taiwan other Chinese languages were forcefully suppressed.

Singapore was much more successful in suppressing Hokkien than Taiwan was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_Mandarin_Campaign

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#117

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

baobrain wrote: post #78
jacobolus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These mostly get called “dialects” for political reasons: the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Media in Chinese languages other than Mandarin is restricted, children are forced to use Mandarin in school, all official business is done in Mandarin, etc. There is a concerted effort to make other languages economically unviable, and generally to dise…

> the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Except they are not mutually unintelligible. Put someone from heilongjiang province in Sichuan and they will still be able to understand the language, albeit with more difficulty. Though there are dialects that do have completely different pronunciation, they all use the same underlying script , save a selec…

Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin are not at all mutually intelligible. Mandarin speakers can't even read Hong Kong newspapers fluently.

Only Mandarin and Cantonese even have a fully developed way of writing with characters. Up until relatively recently Mandarin itself was considered a spoken language, until a written standard (ie correspondence of characters with the words people actually spoke) was developed. Hokkien is in the process of this now in Taiwan, they literally have a government department choosing characters for words (They started off with 900 or something, not sure where they are up to now).

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#118

Post by echevil »

jacobolus wrote: post #110
echevil wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any part of your comment being correct. First of all, "Mandarin" is spoken not only in China mainland, but also the standard in Singapore and Taiwan. It was a creation by the Republic of China (which later became Taiwan government) back in 1923, long before the current Chinese government came into power. Children use Mandarin in school because they have to learn it to be able to communicate with people co…

The language we call Mandarin has been the native language of some parts of northern China for thousands of years, and was certainly not “created” any time recently. Some people speaking dialects of that language migrated to other parts of China. But there are various other languages natively spoken elsewhere in the country. Singapore is a cosmopolitan port city, there are several Chinese languages spoken there, and…

If you can read Chinese, the Chinese versions of wikipedia page on Mandarin Chinese has a lot more detail on its origination: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/普通话

If you cannot, I found an English article for you: http://www.alittledynasty.com/history-of-mandarin-chinese.ht...

To summarize, Mandarin is not created out of nothing for sure, but the concept of "Mandarin Chinese" (or rather, Standard Chinese) started with an effort of newly established Republic of China in 1913, to develop a standard phonetic system and to use as the national language in China. They later published the standard around 1920s, which is essentially a modified version of phonetic system used in Beijing. The dialect now spoken in Beijing is very close to Mandarin, but not exactly the same.

I grew up in China and lived in Singapore for a long time. I can tell you for sure, that the different dialects spoken by Chinese should not be confused with completely different languages. First of all they share the same writing system, the words and syntax we use in various dialects are mostly the same. (Some dialects use a few words differently from others, but that's not surprising at all considering UK english and US english are not exactly the same)

I speak a southern dialect myself which sounds very different from Mandarin. But there is a somewhat systematic mapping from the dialect to Mandarin, so it was really not much an effort to learn Mandarin.

I can imagine there must have been some efforts there to promote the standard in the very beginning, maybe even "forcefully suppressing" other dialects are needed at some point, but considering the huge benefit, it undoubted is the best invention happened in the history of Chinese language.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#119

Post by shripadk »

Epenthesis wrote: post #60
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #43

Based on what friends from South India tell me, it looks like South India in particular is embracing English. Even poor people are sending their children to schools where they can learn English. Most of the people I know, when they text on a phone use the Latin alphabet. India has fully embraced the global system which is based on English. I would guess that within 20 years, more people will speak English on a regula…

Part of that is South India tends to be assertively anti-Hindi for various historical/cultural reasons. Given that, English is the only realistic option for communicating outside a given linguistic community.

It's not exactly true. I am from the South and I love Hindi as much as I love my mother tongue (Kannada). However, the reason there are revolts to the degree it becomes National news is primarily because of the thrust of Hindi on locals. What do I mean by that? Imagine a villager or someone not versed in English wanting to fill a form in a Governmental organisation or a Bank. For a long time, most forms were available only in English or Hindi and not in the local language. This naturally pissed that section of the populace as they had no grasp of either of the languages. This felt "imposing" on them.

I call it Governmental failure of either educating the masses with regards to learning Hindi or them being unable to cater to the local needs (not printing enough forms in the local language). This was in turn exploited by the regional parties who converted this issue to a language-war of sorts, trying to portray that the Central government is imposing Hindi and diminishing the local language. These "movements" were used mainly for political gain. The reason you don't see this happen in the North is because for most, Hindi is a natural fallback language as the script is similar (Devanagari) to their Mother tongue, unlike in the South.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#120

Post by echevil »

HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #116
jacobolus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language we call Mandarin has been the native language of some parts of northern China for thousands of years, and was certainly not “created” any time recently. Some people speaking dialects of that language migrated to other parts of China. But there are various other languages natively spoken elsewhere in the country. Singapore is a cosmopolitan port city, there are several Chinese languages spoken there, and…

> I’m not sure about Singapore but in Taiwan other Chinese languages were forcefully suppressed. Singapore was much more successful in suppressing Hokkien than Taiwan was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_Mandarin_Campaign

Yes, there was a promotion to speak Mandarin, but suppression of dialects was never a major part of the campaign and Hokkien is still spoken by many Singaporean.
Post reply on HN