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The New Wave of Indian Type

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Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#41

Post by svat »

nkoren wrote: post #18

> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…

For example, when the article says:

> five of the most widely used scripts in India—Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurumukhi, Tamil, and Latin. Those five scripts support seven or eight of India’s most widely used languages, together spoken by hundreds of millions of people across the Indian subcontinent.

this list of scripts actually does not cover (for example) Bengali and Telugu, which together have more speakers than the population of the United States.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#42

Post by svat »

henrikeh wrote: post #31

This made me think of Metafont[1] which D. Knuth developed in conjunction with TeX. The idea was to do font-design by drawing with a virtual brush -- but with perfectly smooth curves and a build-in constraint solver. The end result is that the entire Computer Modern family is parameterized (and generated on-demand) as TeX is using it. As an example, the serif, sans-serif and typewriter fonts are the same Metafont pro…

Some Indic typefaces were created using METAFONT in fact, in the 80s and 90s. They used the abilities of METAFONT to provide multiple specific fonts. Some of them have features (variants for conjunct style, e.g. the “Bombay” versus “Calcutta” styles for Devanagari, etc.) that are still not present in any modern (TrueType/OpenType) font available today.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#43

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

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 regular basis than Hindi.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#44

Post by azurezyq »

allpratik wrote: post #39
nkoren wrote: post #18

> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…

Seriously, I am trying my luck in NLP with some Indian languages like Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil. The sheer number of dialects is driving me nuts. Even dialects have very different sounding words or pronunciations which increases the complexity exponentially. But I am trying it only with an eye on its potential. NLP will simply act as the catalyst for technology adoption in the rural and semi-rural area. I'm…

China does have very diverse dialects. But Mandarin is taught in all schools in mainland China and we treat it as standard. Also it is the unified way people from different area communicate.

For younger generation this is not a problem, back in my college life where people in the same class came from different areas, from Xinjiang to Canton to the northeast corner. We have no problem understanding each other though sometimes funny with unique words or accents.

It seems that the problem is not as severe in China as in India.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#45

Post by saagarjha »

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…

South India in particular has a higher literacy rate than the rest of the country, so it might take a while for this to spread.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#46

Post by saagarjha »

ehsankia wrote: post #5
hmhrex wrote: post #2

Side note: I didn't know Google had their own TLD. Is this new? Seems weird that an organization has that ability to do that.

They've added it for over 3 years now, you can read more about it here: https://icannwiki.org/.google blog.google is used pretty often.

There's also https://domains.google.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#47

Post by nkoren »

allpratik wrote: post #39
nkoren wrote: post #18

> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…

Seriously, I am trying my luck in NLP with some Indian languages like Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil. The sheer number of dialects is driving me nuts. Even dialects have very different sounding words or pronunciations which increases the complexity exponentially. But I am trying it only with an eye on its potential. NLP will simply act as the catalyst for technology adoption in the rural and semi-rural area. I'm…

How does phonological complexity affect these things? I'm not a linguist, but Hindi at least seems way complex, with a much larger phoneme inventory than other languages I've studied.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#48

Post by Kwpolska »

bennettfeely wrote: post #15
ehsankia wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've added it for over 3 years now, you can read more about it here: https://icannwiki.org/.google blog.google is used pretty often.

Waiting for google.google to become a thing

https://com.google/ is. It used to be a flipped version of google.com: https://web.archive.org/web/20150401041958/https://com.googl...

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#49

Post by i2om3r »

I always wondered why many non-Latin (mostly cursive) scripts have little variation across different typefaces. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough? Well, the article mentions a similar observation by a Sri Lankan typographer, so I guess I am not alone. Can someone maybe point me to other non-Latin typefaces that have "their own typographic style"? I found the Baloo samples (last one in the article) refreshing. The style of the Tamil and Devanagari samples is very close to the Latin sample. For the Mina samples (first figure in the article), I can see that they try to capture the character of the Exo Latin typeface, with certain strokes getting narrower towards the end and its superelliptic curves (are there typographic terms for these?). I am not used to reading Bengali, but the style of the sample looks like it is in a font that has a different weight.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#50

Post by shrimp_emoji »

nkoren wrote: post #18

> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…

Why fetishize diversity for its own sake, especially when it's a barrier to communication?

I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now). The information suddenly marketable to or directly consumable by anyone at any given place will significantly increase.

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