3 ms·

I Can Text You a Pile of Poo, but I Can’t Write My Name

10 points by CapacitorSet 9y ago

saurik 9y ago
> But Bengalis were forced to make similar orthographic contortions just to write a simple email: ত + ্ + ‍ = ‍ৎ (the third character is the invisible “zero width joiner”). > But the final letter [of my name] has still not been given its own Unicode character, so I have to use a substitute. I am having a difficult time determining, partly due to the example in the previous paragraph, whether the issue is that Unicode can't represent the final character of the writer's name using a single/correct glyph or if that glyph simply requires multiple codepoints (at which point I would argue this is an issue with their keyboard or text editor, not the storage format of the text).
- wahern 9y ago
  It's sort of a poor example, especially when the skin tone emojis also use combining characters. The overall frustration is understandable, I'm just not sure if there are any easy remedies, especially if the metric for success is assigning a code point to every grapheme that some group considers sufficiently distinctive. Having a more diverse leadership might help, as the author suggests. But his anecdotes aren't convincing. I'd like to see a more comprehensive critique of the diversity of the leadership, particularly regarding their credentials and experience. English readers would never accept a Greco Unification because English orthography _already_ went through tremendous simplification and unification at the behest of technological necessity, starting from the printing press but especially since the advent of computers. European languages generally are far along that path. Excepting the Western/Cyrillic divide, the European languages he described are already substantially unified, which he perhaps unwittingly takes for granted. To some extent the author is merely experiencing what European authors began experiencing long ago; namely, yet another culture clash with modernity. Which isn't to say that European orthography isn't privileged. Just that the scope of that privilege can be more difficult to determine than one would think given the current state of affairs. To some extent European orthography might seem privileged because it was already drastically simplified and already underwent significant unification. Yes, there are many one-off esoteric European glyphs, but you can't judge how "privileged" that is without accounting for all the orthography discarded and abandoned, even in the past century. Also, it's worth realizing that the Unicode project is literally destined to fail in the sense that languages and meaning are constantly changing. Unicode will always struggle with the inherent limitations of the goal. Arguably non-syllabic scripts are especially difficult to deal with in this manner. We should be careful not to equivocate written languages. English is, frankly, much easier to accommodate than many other languages, especially considering how English accommodated to technology. Finally, it's worth pointing out that emojis were originally a Japanese phenomenon. More specifically (lest people think I forgot about the long history of ASCII emoji), AFAIU Unicode began accepting emojis at the behest of Japanese companies, and the first groups of glyphs were from Japan. Understanding why they first evolved in Japan might actually go a long way to addressing some of the author's questions and criticisms.

10 points by CapacitorSet 9y ago

> But Bengalis were forced to make similar orthographic contortions just to write a simple email: ত + ্ + ‍ = ‍ৎ (the third character is the invisible “zero width joiner”). > But the final letter [of my name] has still not been given its own Unicode character, so I have to use a substitute. I am having a difficult time determining, partly due to the example in the previous paragraph, whether the issue is that Unicode can't represent the final character of the writer's name using a single/correct glyph or if that glyph simply requires multiple codepoints (at which point I would argue this is an issue with their keyboard or text editor, not the storage format of the text).

wahern 9y ago
It's sort of a poor example, especially when the skin tone emojis also use combining characters. The overall frustration is understandable, I'm just not sure if there are any easy remedies, especially if the metric for success is assigning a code point to every grapheme that some group considers sufficiently distinctive. Having a more diverse leadership might help, as the author suggests. But his anecdotes aren't convincing. I'd like to see a more comprehensive critique of the diversity of the leadership, particularly regarding their credentials and experience. English readers would never accept a Greco Unification because English orthography _already_ went through tremendous simplification and unification at the behest of technological necessity, starting from the printing press but especially since the advent of computers. European languages generally are far along that path. Excepting the Western/Cyrillic divide, the European languages he described are already substantially unified, which he perhaps unwittingly takes for granted. To some extent the author is merely experiencing what European authors began experiencing long ago; namely, yet another culture clash with modernity. Which isn't to say that European orthography isn't privileged. Just that the scope of that privilege can be more difficult to determine than one would think given the current state of affairs. To some extent European orthography might seem privileged because it was already drastically simplified and already underwent significant unification. Yes, there are many one-off esoteric European glyphs, but you can't judge how "privileged" that is without accounting for all the orthography discarded and abandoned, even in the past century. Also, it's worth realizing that the Unicode project is literally destined to fail in the sense that languages and meaning are constantly changing. Unicode will always struggle with the inherent limitations of the goal. Arguably non-syllabic scripts are especially difficult to deal with in this manner. We should be careful not to equivocate written languages. English is, frankly, much easier to accommodate than many other languages, especially considering how English accommodated to technology. Finally, it's worth pointing out that emojis were originally a Japanese phenomenon. More specifically (lest people think I forgot about the long history of ASCII emoji), AFAIU Unicode began accepting emojis at the behest of Japanese companies, and the first groups of glyphs were from Japan. Understanding why they first evolved in Japan might actually go a long way to addressing some of the author's questions and criticisms.