4 ms·

> not having all the characters needed for English I've heard this argument a few times, and each time it's just as contrived, particularly if you stick to Ame

by _vbdg 6y ago

> not having all the characters needed for English I've heard this argument a few times, and each time it's just as contrived, particularly if you stick to American English. While I'm happy to acknowledge it's not good enough for other languages, ASCII is plenty good for English. Unless you're trying to type cafe with an accented e to be fancy or type that old conjoined-ae character, ASCII is fine for everyday usage. See the fact that most Americans have never installed a separate keyboard layout.

catalogia 6y ago
The 'long s' (ſ) was still in fairly common use in English less than 200 years ago. Consequently there are a lot of historically relevant documents written in English that can't be faithfully reproduced using ASCII. This may not be relevant to most people, but it seems plausibly relevant to libraries or archivists (for instance the Library of Congress.) Example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Bill_of_Rights_Pg1of1_AC.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Bill_of_...
- mark-r 6y ago
  And that's exactly why Unicode was invented.
knolax 6y ago
Funny you mention American English given the fact that a great many Americans have various diacritic marks in their names. You can make the claim that those names are "foreign" but the most common ancestry group in the US is German. Regardless of the technical arguments, from the perspective of non-programmers, when they see things like the CA DMV being incapabale of doing things as simple as recording a diacritic over a person's name, it doesn't reflect well on the software industry and programmers as a professsion.
- catalogia 6y ago
  > You can make the claim that those names are "foreign" but the most common ancestry group in the US is German. While true, I think the overwhelming majority of German-Americans anglicized their names several generations ago. For instance, my great-great grandfather switched from Müller to Miller. This is probably less true of more recent arrivals.
dhosek 6y ago
It's naïve to assume that American English does not use diacriticals.
- drran 6y ago
  I newer saw correctly spelled name of Kyïv (Kyiv, Kiev) city in English texts.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    Kyiv is the official form according to the Ukraine government/mapping agency (according to Wikipedia). The most common English spelling is Kiev. That reflects the English pronunciation. (The British one anyway.) But many significant European cities with a long history have a different name in English than the local languages: Cologne, Munich, Florence, Naples, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Prague.
    - dmurray 6y ago
      This isn't just Anglophones being boorish and Anglocentric, either. Those cities also have different names in German or, more obviously, Chinese.
      - Symbiote 6y ago
        Indeed, and naturally British and Irish cities have different names in other (European) languages. In French: Douvres, Londres, Édimbourg. In German: Edinburg. In Italian: Edimburgo, Glascovia, Londra, Novocastro, Dublino. In Chinese: Jiànqiáo (剑桥) (lit. "sword bridge", Cambridge)
  - gdy 6y ago
    Have you ever wondered why Russians are indifferent to the fact that Moskva is spelled Moscow in English?
    - allarm 6y ago
mark-r 6y ago
I'd hate to work for the New Yorker without ö on the keyboard, but for 99.99% of American usage ASCII is plenty good enough.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  ASCII doesn't even have proper quotation marks or dashes. There's a reason software for text production has long made it easy to use characters outside of the ASCII range.
  - foota 6y ago
    You're talking past OP. Most people don't care about matching quotations or dashes.
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      Most people will care about something not in ASCII. Windows-1252 encoding was supported on American computers long before Unicode. I remember “smart quotes” being promoted as a feature of word processors. Even for people who didn't care for the quotes: • everyone appreciates ¢, ° for °F or 46° N, ¼, ½, ¾, × and ÷, • people handling large texts want §, †, ‡ and maybe ¶, • businesses want ©, ® and ™, • scientists and engineers need µ, ±, ², ³, ·. Web browsers have made it more difficult for the average user to enter these characters, but software like Microsoft Word has supported easy ways to insert many of them automatically.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> While I'm happy to acknowledge it's not good enough for other languages, ASCII is plenty good for English. It’s good enough for the style of American English adopted as a concession to typewriter limitations, since that’s pretty much exactly what ASCII is designed to support. OTOH, American English as used outside of that context doesn’t use straight quotes, but rounded ones in each direction with different meaning, uses various diacritical marks, and also uses the cent sign (¢), the obelisk (†), diesis (‡), pilcrow (¶), section sign (§), division sign (÷), multiplication sign (×), less-(and greater-)than-or-equals sign (≤ and ≥), angle brackets (⟨ and ⟩, which aren’t the same as less-than/greater-than symbols), the interrobang (‽), and—the next three distinct from the hyphen—the minus sign, en-dash, and em-dash. > See the fact that most Americans have never installed a separate keyboard layout. Common software used for text, like MS-Word, provides convenience methods for many non-ASCII characters without an keyboard layout change.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Some operating systems extend this to work across all apps.
  - valenceelectron 6y ago
    Since I know that macOS conveniently allows to type en and em dashes (option+hyphen and shift+option+hyphen respectively) I'm using both frequently in the appropriate situations instead of just putting hyphens everywhere.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  I don't see at all how not being able to type certain non alphabetical symbols means it isn't good for English. Half you quoted are general math symbols that have nothing to do with English.
  - knolax 6y ago
    I want you to explain to your grandmother why the software you wrote can handle dollar signs but not cent signs.
Someone 6y ago
I didn’t know ‘cafe’ was even a thing and wondered what’s fancy about café, so I had to Google a bit. I learned that, yes, Americans do spell ‘cafe’, but the most common spelling still is café. Even https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Café https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Café redirects cafe to café. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cafe‘ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cafe‘: “variants: or less commonly cafe” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/essential-american-english/cafe?q=Cafe https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/essential-americ...: “noun (also cafe)” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cafe https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cafe also prefers to see the accent That spelling preference may be shifting. I couldn’t find evidence for it, though.
- _vbdg 6y ago
  > the most common spelling still is café Really? The data say otherwise: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Ccafe&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccaf%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccafe%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ccaf%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccafe%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Cca... Do you have another source that supports the popularity of the diacritic variant? Rather, café doesn't increase in popularity until after 2000, and thus would appear to be an affectation of sophistication.

by _vbdg 6y ago

catalogia 6y ago

The 'long s' (ſ) was still in fairly common use in English less than 200 years ago. Consequently there are a lot of historically relevant documents written in English that can't be faithfully reproduced using ASCII. This may not be relevant to most people, but it seems plausibly relevant to libraries or archivists (for instance the Library of Congress.) Example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Bill_of_Rights_Pg1of1_AC.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Bill_of_...

mark-r 6y ago
And that's exactly why Unicode was invented.

knolax 6y ago

Funny you mention American English given the fact that a great many Americans have various diacritic marks in their names. You can make the claim that those names are "foreign" but the most common ancestry group in the US is German. Regardless of the technical arguments, from the perspective of non-programmers, when they see things like the CA DMV being incapabale of doing things as simple as recording a diacritic over a person's name, it doesn't reflect well on the software industry and programmers as a professsion.

catalogia 6y ago
> You can make the claim that those names are "foreign" but the most common ancestry group in the US is German. While true, I think the overwhelming majority of German-Americans anglicized their names several generations ago. For instance, my great-great grandfather switched from Müller to Miller. This is probably less true of more recent arrivals.

dhosek 6y ago

It's naïve to assume that American English does not use diacriticals.

drran 6y ago
I newer saw correctly spelled name of Kyïv (Kyiv, Kiev) city in English texts.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  Kyiv is the official form according to the Ukraine government/mapping agency (according to Wikipedia). The most common English spelling is Kiev. That reflects the English pronunciation. (The British one anyway.) But many significant European cities with a long history have a different name in English than the local languages: Cologne, Munich, Florence, Naples, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Prague.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    This isn't just Anglophones being boorish and Anglocentric, either. Those cities also have different names in German or, more obviously, Chinese.
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      Indeed, and naturally British and Irish cities have different names in other (European) languages. In French: Douvres, Londres, Édimbourg. In German: Edinburg. In Italian: Edimburgo, Glascovia, Londra, Novocastro, Dublino. In Chinese: Jiànqiáo (剑桥) (lit. "sword bridge", Cambridge)
- gdy 6y ago
  Have you ever wondered why Russians are indifferent to the fact that Moskva is spelled Moscow in English?
  - allarm 6y ago

mark-r 6y ago

I'd hate to work for the New Yorker without ö on the keyboard, but for 99.99% of American usage ASCII is plenty good enough.

dragonwriter 6y ago
ASCII doesn't even have proper quotation marks or dashes. There's a reason software for text production has long made it easy to use characters outside of the ASCII range.
- foota 6y ago
  You're talking past OP. Most people don't care about matching quotations or dashes.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    Most people will care about something not in ASCII. Windows-1252 encoding was supported on American computers long before Unicode. I remember “smart quotes” being promoted as a feature of word processors. Even for people who didn't care for the quotes: • everyone appreciates ¢, ° for °F or 46° N, ¼, ½, ¾, × and ÷, • people handling large texts want §, †, ‡ and maybe ¶, • businesses want ©, ® and ™, • scientists and engineers need µ, ±, ², ³, ·. Web browsers have made it more difficult for the average user to enter these characters, but software like Microsoft Word has supported easy ways to insert many of them automatically.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> While I'm happy to acknowledge it's not good enough for other languages, ASCII is plenty good for English. It’s good enough for the style of American English adopted as a concession to typewriter limitations, since that’s pretty much exactly what ASCII is designed to support. OTOH, American English as used outside of that context doesn’t use straight quotes, but rounded ones in each direction with different meaning, uses various diacritical marks, and also uses the cent sign (¢), the obelisk (†), diesis (‡), pilcrow (¶), section sign (§), division sign (÷), multiplication sign (×), less-(and greater-)than-or-equals sign (≤ and ≥), angle brackets (⟨ and ⟩, which aren’t the same as less-than/greater-than symbols), the interrobang (‽), and—the next three distinct from the hyphen—the minus sign, en-dash, and em-dash. > See the fact that most Americans have never installed a separate keyboard layout. Common software used for text, like MS-Word, provides convenience methods for many non-ASCII characters without an keyboard layout change.

saagarjha 6y ago
Some operating systems extend this to work across all apps.
- valenceelectron 6y ago
  Since I know that macOS conveniently allows to type en and em dashes (option+hyphen and shift+option+hyphen respectively) I'm using both frequently in the appropriate situations instead of just putting hyphens everywhere.
oh_sigh 6y ago
I don't see at all how not being able to type certain non alphabetical symbols means it isn't good for English. Half you quoted are general math symbols that have nothing to do with English.
- knolax 6y ago
  I want you to explain to your grandmother why the software you wrote can handle dollar signs but not cent signs.

Someone 6y ago

I didn’t know ‘cafe’ was even a thing and wondered what’s fancy about café, so I had to Google a bit. I learned that, yes, Americans do spell ‘cafe’, but the most common spelling still is café. Even https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Café https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Café redirects cafe to café. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cafe‘ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cafe‘: “variants: or less commonly cafe” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/essential-american-english/cafe?q=Cafe https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/essential-americ...: “noun (also cafe)” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cafe https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cafe also prefers to see the accent That spelling preference may be shifting. I couldn’t find evidence for it, though.

_vbdg 6y ago
> the most common spelling still is café Really? The data say otherwise: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Ccafe&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccaf%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccafe%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ccaf%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccafe%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Cca... Do you have another source that supports the popularity of the diacritic variant? Rather, café doesn't increase in popularity until after 2000, and thus would appear to be an affectation of sophistication.