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Speaking as someone whose native language has not one, but three of those weird letters, I would need it because it makes searching about a billion times easier
by scbrg 6y ago
Speaking as someone whose native language has not one, but three of those weird letters, I would need it because it makes searching about a billion times easier. There's plenty of situations where typing my native language's characters is inconvenient for a multitude of reasons, and any particular document is not likely to hold so many individual words dissimilar only by using those particular different letters that the inconvenience of the ambiguity is going to outweigh the convenience of not having to convince my current device to type, say, an ä.
- enriquto 6y agoWould you also match it with α? Notice that "a" and "α" are always completely interchangeable, as opposed to "a" and "ä". What about their uppercase versions (which are visually identical)? Or all similarly-looking letters between Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets? And what about letters that are almost identical but have very different meanings like "w" and "ω"; would you match them ?
- scbrg 6y ago> Would you also match it with α? I have no idea. I don't speak Greek, and I am not familiar enough with its alphabet. The question, I suppose, is if there's a reasonable/intuitive enough mapping between the Greek and the Latin alphabet that it would be possible to search for Greek words using a non Greek keyboard. If yes, then I suppose my answer would also be yes - but I'm happy to be corrected by someone who is actually speaks Greek. My point is that when it comes to things like searching, usefulness trumps purity. I search because I want to find shit. Not because I want to get perfect feedback on linguistic details from my software.
- zajio1am 6y ago> usefulness trumps purity. Usefulness of such behavior is objectionable. Characters with and without diacritics are different graphemes, part of different words. If i search something, i do not want to get plenty of irrelevant results. Just that happened to me few days ago, when i entered a rare word root to search box in Firefox and was surprised that got plenty of irrelevant results because there was common word differing in diacritic marks. Even if sometimes there is a text written without diacritic marks where there should be, it is usually consistent for whole document, so if i search some word that contain diacritics, i know whether to enter the word with or without it.
- enriquto 6y agoI guess we can all agree that there must always be an option to select between strict matches (without identification of different characters) and fuzzy matches, with varying degrees of "fuzziness" (diacritics, case, etc).
- necovek 6y agoI don't think we "all" can ever agree on something "always" being true. I can imagine cases where enough context is available and you can only do the actually usable search. Heck, even Google doesn't give you any option, though I frequently hate that.
- necovek 6y agoThere was a great example from someone above: sometimes you search to _skip shit_ instead. If I am looking for ž, I might actually want to find where it first occurs as opposed to all the occurrences of z which will be many more.