6 ms·

A few minor things missing in OP (mostly CJK related) - Code point is sometimes not enough to determine the glyph. For example, U+5199 must look different in S

by euske 7y ago

A few minor things missing in OP (mostly CJK related) - Code point is sometimes not enough to determine the glyph. For example, U+5199 must look different in Simplified Chinese and Japanese. Typically this is handled by using different fonts, but more formally it should be marked with different lang attributes (in case of HTML). - Top-to-bottom writing mode is still pretty much in use in Japanese. HTML support is poor, but it's common in PDF. Caveat: Latin alphabets are rotated by 90 degree (as explained in OP), but for punctuations, simply rotating the glyph isn't enough because the center line is going to be slightly off. You need special glyphs for rotated punctuation. - Unlike Latin scripts, most Chinese and Japanese characters are free to break line at any point, but there are exceptions: contracted letters (e.g. ちょっ) cannot be split. So you'll end up with treating each letter as a separate word. (Contracted letters are treated as one word.)

echelon 7y ago
Elaboration for "ちょっ" Japanese hiragana chi, small yo, and small tsu. Hiragana is a syllabary (not alphabet!) comprised of 46 sounds. Small hiragana can be used to modify the sound of the leading character to expand the set of available phonemes. Here, "Chi (small)yo" becomes "cho". Small tsu is special. It represents a doubled or germinated consonant. For example ちょっと (chotto) sounds like chot-to. Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kh9Kk_RHn8Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kh9Kk_RHn8Q Japanese is a really fun language. If you've ever had an interest in learning it, I recommend it. Reading kanji is a joy in and of itself, because it has a pleasant inner logic that gets deeper the more you learn.
- iamvik 7y ago
  geminated not germinated haha it's not a seed :p
  - labster 7y ago
    Now you’re just arguing seminantics.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  Japanese is one of the few languages with a worse writing system than English. Hats off to them for it. I do miss the pre-war spellings though, where they wrote things based on 10c pronunciation, eg AU is pronounced OH (like in French). Tibetan is also in pretty desperate need of spelling reform. I’d love to hear replies about other terrible writing systems.
  - gumby 7y ago
    In the scheme of writing systems it's hard for me to see why English is so bad. In general writing (like spoken grammar) is so heavily used that all the "rough corners" get sanded smooth pretty rapidly and continuously. For example, though the histogram of Kanji/Hanzi has a very steep drop-off, it's not that hard for people to recognize and keep track of, because characters that were hard to read at first tend to get restructured or dropped. As far as Indo-European languages go, languages like English and French are quite conservative in spelling and underlying meaning, which means they do diverge from pronunciation but retain semantic clues which help the reader unlock the meaning of unknown words. While languages that continuously reform to try to match pronunciation shifts (e.g. German) discard this info. In addition they have to pick one canonical pronunciation, and themselves typically retain various homophonic issues (e.g. how many ways can you write the sound of ä (I don't mean "ae")). Even as a kid (should be "easy to learn", right?) I struggled far more with the variants of the devanagari alphabet even though it was so phonetic. But hundreds of millions of people use it every day without thinking about it.
    - earthboundkid 7y ago
      English is pretty bad unless you are a total orthography history nerd. For example, people routinely mispronounce the name of the President of China. (It’s closer to Shi than Zi.) Why? Because English has a strong preference for retaining native spellings even when the other language has a completely incompatible set of pronunciation rules. With Chinese this is extra silly because pinyin is only one of a million ways of romanizing Chinese and basically the least English compatible method. English spelling is like a Hofstader puzzle: to be able to master it, you must master the spellings of all languages plus English itself recursively going back to the Great Vowel Shift. It’s not a good system.
kccqzy 7y ago
Top-to-bottom writing is not just prevalent in Japanese but also in Chinese too. Pick up any professionally published book in Taiwan and chances are it's written top-to-bottom.
- gumby 7y ago
  And Mongolian, Korean, Uyghur... If you add support for archaic systems you have to handle vertical bottom to top and boustrophedon too.
  - lifthrasiir 7y ago
    Uh, vertical writing in Korea was famously abolished decades ago when the Chosun Ilbo, a prominent conservative newspaper notorious for its love with now almost dead hanja uses and vertical writing, finally gave up with that in March 2, 1999.
    - gumby 7y ago
      It’s true — actually I thought it had been abandoned in the 70s but I figured that was recent enough not to be “archaic” like some of the obscure bottom-to-top scripts.
rendaw 7y ago
Also Arabic mixed with English goes RTL for the Arabic parts and LTR for the English parts: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/javafx/user-interface-tutorial/text-settings.htm https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/javafx/user-interface-tutor... (bottom)
paulddraper 7y ago
> but more formally it should be marked with different lang attributes (in case of HTML). Isn't the that point of UNIcode? To unify all text into a single character set so that can exist side-by-side without messing with code pages? Isn't this just code pages all over again?
- MrEldritch 7y ago
  "Han unification" (deciding that Chinese and Japanese characters were 'basically the same' and could be represented with the same set of codepoints) was a terrible idea, yes, mainly brought from the Unicode foundation not being run by people who spoke or wrote either language, and not wanting to "waste" their limited code points in the BMP on languages using an inconvenient number of characters.

by euske 7y ago

echelon 7y ago

Elaboration for "ちょっ" Japanese hiragana chi, small yo, and small tsu. Hiragana is a syllabary (not alphabet!) comprised of 46 sounds. Small hiragana can be used to modify the sound of the leading character to expand the set of available phonemes. Here, "Chi (small)yo" becomes "cho". Small tsu is special. It represents a doubled or germinated consonant. For example ちょっと (chotto) sounds like chot-to. Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kh9Kk_RHn8Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kh9Kk_RHn8Q Japanese is a really fun language. If you've ever had an interest in learning it, I recommend it. Reading kanji is a joy in and of itself, because it has a pleasant inner logic that gets deeper the more you learn.

iamvik 7y ago
geminated not germinated haha it's not a seed :p
- labster 7y ago
  Now you’re just arguing seminantics.
earthboundkid 7y ago
Japanese is one of the few languages with a worse writing system than English. Hats off to them for it. I do miss the pre-war spellings though, where they wrote things based on 10c pronunciation, eg AU is pronounced OH (like in French). Tibetan is also in pretty desperate need of spelling reform. I’d love to hear replies about other terrible writing systems.
- gumby 7y ago
  In the scheme of writing systems it's hard for me to see why English is so bad. In general writing (like spoken grammar) is so heavily used that all the "rough corners" get sanded smooth pretty rapidly and continuously. For example, though the histogram of Kanji/Hanzi has a very steep drop-off, it's not that hard for people to recognize and keep track of, because characters that were hard to read at first tend to get restructured or dropped. As far as Indo-European languages go, languages like English and French are quite conservative in spelling and underlying meaning, which means they do diverge from pronunciation but retain semantic clues which help the reader unlock the meaning of unknown words. While languages that continuously reform to try to match pronunciation shifts (e.g. German) discard this info. In addition they have to pick one canonical pronunciation, and themselves typically retain various homophonic issues (e.g. how many ways can you write the sound of ä (I don't mean "ae")). Even as a kid (should be "easy to learn", right?) I struggled far more with the variants of the devanagari alphabet even though it was so phonetic. But hundreds of millions of people use it every day without thinking about it.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    English is pretty bad unless you are a total orthography history nerd. For example, people routinely mispronounce the name of the President of China. (It’s closer to Shi than Zi.) Why? Because English has a strong preference for retaining native spellings even when the other language has a completely incompatible set of pronunciation rules. With Chinese this is extra silly because pinyin is only one of a million ways of romanizing Chinese and basically the least English compatible method. English spelling is like a Hofstader puzzle: to be able to master it, you must master the spellings of all languages plus English itself recursively going back to the Great Vowel Shift. It’s not a good system.

kccqzy 7y ago

Top-to-bottom writing is not just prevalent in Japanese but also in Chinese too. Pick up any professionally published book in Taiwan and chances are it's written top-to-bottom.

gumby 7y ago
And Mongolian, Korean, Uyghur... If you add support for archaic systems you have to handle vertical bottom to top and boustrophedon too.
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  Uh, vertical writing in Korea was famously abolished decades ago when the Chosun Ilbo, a prominent conservative newspaper notorious for its love with now almost dead hanja uses and vertical writing, finally gave up with that in March 2, 1999.
  - gumby 7y ago
    It’s true — actually I thought it had been abandoned in the 70s but I figured that was recent enough not to be “archaic” like some of the obscure bottom-to-top scripts.

rendaw 7y ago

Also Arabic mixed with English goes RTL for the Arabic parts and LTR for the English parts: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/javafx/user-interface-tutorial/text-settings.htm https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/javafx/user-interface-tutor... (bottom)

paulddraper 7y ago

> but more formally it should be marked with different lang attributes (in case of HTML). Isn't the that point of UNIcode? To unify all text into a single character set so that can exist side-by-side without messing with code pages? Isn't this just code pages all over again?

MrEldritch 7y ago
"Han unification" (deciding that Chinese and Japanese characters were 'basically the same' and could be represented with the same set of codepoints) was a terrible idea, yes, mainly brought from the Unicode foundation not being run by people who spoke or wrote either language, and not wanting to "waste" their limited code points in the BMP on languages using an inconvenient number of characters.