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The New Wave of Indian Type

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Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#61

Post by nkoren »

HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #58
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…

> presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend Did you intend for that to come across as condescending?

You mean to the Western mind? I've got one, so yeah I feel somewhat at liberty to make mildly self-depreciating jokes about it. Sort of the way that Woody Allen is allowed to make good-natured fun of pedophiles.

Egads, that's terrible company to keep. Moving on now...

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#62

Post by wsxcde »

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…

Nah, the issue of people learning English in school is totally orthogonal to the use of the Roman script in texting. People used the Roman script for texting when that was the only script available on the mobile phones. Android has really great support for most Indian scripts now (with the notable exception of Urdu) and I'm seeing a resurgence of texting in native scripts.

Learning English is viewed as a "job" thing -- it's what you do to have a good career. And English isn't used in the same ways as native languages are. A lot of the serious literature, art and politics happens exclusively in languages that are not English and using English in these contexts outs you as the equivalent of the "condescending coastal elite" in the US.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#63

Post by rspeer »

elcapitan wrote: post #38
Tomte wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is at least conceptually part of Unicode. You can encode „ü“ both as the character (one code point) and as „u“ followed by „modifier Umlaut“ (two code points).

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 this radical, but a bit narrower, but the strokes need to be the same width and not distorted".

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#64

Post by huebnerob »

HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #58
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…

> presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend Did you intend for that to come across as condescending?

There's nothing condescending about stating that there are some world views that may be beyond our immediate rapid comprehension. I have a 'western mind' and I was not offended.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#65

Post by sremani »

svat wrote: post #41
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…

I do not know if they are more than population of US, but not including Bangla and/or Telugu for seven or eight most spoken languages is Criminal negligence.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#66

Post by draw_down »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #50
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.

> I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now).

Good grief.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#67

Post by sremani »

guruparan18 wrote: post #40
manojlds wrote: post #16

Nice to see lot of Tamil love in there.

Tamil has the largest users in internet[1]. It does enjoy the highest adoption. 1. https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/in/pdf/2017/04/Indi...

also Google CEO himself being ...

well, I will not go there! But the absence of Telugu font in talking about Indian fonts is eerily disconcerting.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#68

Post by msaharia »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #50
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.

So, people should give up their culture to become easier preys to global consumerism? Diversity is not a problem - it's fundamental to the survival of a species.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#69

Post by islayfan »

sarabande wrote: post #11

Speaking of Asian fonts, does anyone know of CJK character sets that can be loaded via CDN à la Google Fonts -- for example, Google's Noto CJK Simplified Chinese fonts?

Google Fonts has a few up for Korean, https://design.google/news/google-fonts-launches-korean-supp...

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#70

Post by warent »

sp332 wrote: post #20
hmhrex wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I've just never really noticed before. Maybe a case of glancing and just imagining the `.com` after.

It was pretty gradual. For a while the only public-facing domain was elgoog.google which I think started as an April Fool's joke.

Not that it matters much but IIRC joke was http://com.google
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