114 ms·

Same for those with Arabic, Persian, Korean, Thai, Russian ... names

by caf 5y ago

egeozcan 5y ago
Also Greek, Turkish, German, Romanian... Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters? If you have special letters in your name, you'll have a different name in another country without that letter. My surname is supposed to be Özcan, but it's Ozcan or Oezcan in many official documents. Don't even let me start with the "Turkish iİıI problem"... I mean it's not totally unrecognizable but it's a different name nevertheless. I was talking to a Romanian colleague recently and she told me that most of the country uses some US keyboard layout instead of Romanian and cannot type Romanian letters, so people have 2 names even in their home country.
- gpderetta 5y ago
  thinking that ASCII is enough for English is a bit naïve.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    Spelling it that way is a fantastic way to look pretentious.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      It's at least a little more elementary than that. There are many, many school teachers of young children that will tell you that words like coöperative lost a lot useful disambiguation power when English dropped support for such syllabic markers. I see words written like that and I think of grade school, which seems like the opposite of pretension.
    - gpderetta 5y ago
      I could have spelled in the naive way, but then the joke wouldn't have worked.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  > Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters Latin. Yes, a lot of textbooks add some diacritics to show pronunciation (as Latin wasn't 100% consistent between spelling and pronunciation), but the Romans themselves didn't use them.
  - N19PEDL2 5y ago
    So they will never face this problem in Vatican City [0]. Although I guess that Vatican institutions are not required to comply with GDPR. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5vcd2h/til_the_atms_in_the_vatican_city_are_the_only/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5vcd2h/til_t...
  - cabalamat 5y ago
    > the Romans themselves didn't use them They did sometimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic)
- clankyclanker 5y ago
  Not even English can be correctly written in (lower) ASCII, it has far too many borrowed words, like naïve and résumé. Say nothing of archaic spellings or ligatures, like encyclopædia, or ruﬀle. It's almost surprising ASCII was as successful as it is.
  - egeozcan 5y ago
    "Not good enough, but used everywhere so nothing we can do" is the worst enemy of good, even worse than perfectionism.
    - mastax 5y ago
      Worse is Better: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
  - retrac 5y ago
    Not that surprising. It was a big improvement over the 6-bit encodings that came before. All caps! And it was broadly assumed from the 70s onward that the 8th bit extended to a regional character set. Even my 1980s Canadian Apple //e supported displaying French characters, in some variant of Latin-1 I think. The easy extensibility of ASCII on 8-bit-byte systems was a big part of its popularity (and eventually its greatest curse when all the divergent extensions started meeting online). Or just consider how the Japanese put up with computing in pure katakana (their writing system's equivalent of all caps) well into the 1980s.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    Most English ligatures (pretty much all other than æ and œ) are simply artifacts of formatting, rather than actual letters. With that in mind, ligature versions of fl and ffl (and the like) are unnecessary.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      There's a person who was involved for years in the maintainance of the venerable CSound audio programming language who specifically changed his last name to ffitch (with a ligature, and no leading capital). I don't know for certain, but I think it was intended to provoke/test/trouble weak text representation in software.
- anthk 5y ago
  Basque.
- int_19h 5y ago
  > Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters Indonesian and Malay languages.
- samus 5y ago
  Dutch, although they insist on treating the ligature IJ as a letter on its own. It's even part of the sort order in dictionaries and telephone books. Also, probably thanks to Dutch colonialism, the unmodified Latin alphabet is the official writing system in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Singapore, and is used to write the Malay and Indonesian languages. It is also used as the base for romanization systems for languages that don't have a latin-style alphabet already. These are often designed to stick as close to plain lating as possible. Apart from academia and language teaching, a few of them are actually used by governments to render names in latin characters for passports, street signs etc. Personally, I think that the plain latin alphabet is quite limited and that extensions are necessary. Accents, macrons, circumflexes, etc. are certainly annoying to input, but certainly not worse than inventing completely new letters or using digraphs for everything. I rather think that our educational systems don't teach well how to handle them. We don't have to pronounce them all correctly, and certainly can't be expected to, but typing them is not impossible at all!
  - Deukhoofd 5y ago
    Dutch can't be fully written in (non extended) ASCII. https://www.opentaal.org/het-laatste-nieuws/171-karakterfrequentie https://www.opentaal.org/het-laatste-nieuws/171-karakterfreq...
- kps 5y ago
  ASCII was designed to handle the common Western European accents ˊˋˆ˜¨ by overstriking. 0x08 0x60 is not inherently a worse encoding than 0xCC 0x80 for a combining grave accent.

Same for those with Arabic, Persian, Korean, Thai, Russian ... names

by caf 5y ago

Same for those with Arabic, Persian, Korean, Thai, Russian ... names

Also Greek, Turkish, German, Romanian... Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters? If you have special letters in your name, you'll have a different name in another country without that letter. My surname is supposed to be Özcan, but it's Ozcan or Oezcan in many official documents. Don't even let me start with the "Turkish iİıI problem"... I mean it's not totally unrecognizable but it's a different name nevertheless. I was talking to a Romanian colleague recently and she told me that most of the country uses some US keyboard layout instead of Romanian and cannot type Romanian letters, so people have 2 names even in their home country.

gpderetta 5y ago
thinking that ASCII is enough for English is a bit naïve.
- xxpor 5y ago
  Spelling it that way is a fantastic way to look pretentious.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    It's at least a little more elementary than that. There are many, many school teachers of young children that will tell you that words like coöperative lost a lot useful disambiguation power when English dropped support for such syllabic markers. I see words written like that and I think of grade school, which seems like the opposite of pretension.
  - gpderetta 5y ago
    I could have spelled in the naive way, but then the joke wouldn't have worked.
jhbadger 5y ago
> Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters Latin. Yes, a lot of textbooks add some diacritics to show pronunciation (as Latin wasn't 100% consistent between spelling and pronunciation), but the Romans themselves didn't use them.
- N19PEDL2 5y ago
  So they will never face this problem in Vatican City [0]. Although I guess that Vatican institutions are not required to comply with GDPR. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5vcd2h/til_the_atms_in_the_vatican_city_are_the_only/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5vcd2h/til_t...
- cabalamat 5y ago
  > the Romans themselves didn't use them They did sometimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic)
clankyclanker 5y ago
Not even English can be correctly written in (lower) ASCII, it has far too many borrowed words, like naïve and résumé. Say nothing of archaic spellings or ligatures, like encyclopædia, or ruﬀle. It's almost surprising ASCII was as successful as it is.
- egeozcan 5y ago
  "Not good enough, but used everywhere so nothing we can do" is the worst enemy of good, even worse than perfectionism.
  - mastax 5y ago
    Worse is Better: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
- retrac 5y ago
  Not that surprising. It was a big improvement over the 6-bit encodings that came before. All caps! And it was broadly assumed from the 70s onward that the 8th bit extended to a regional character set. Even my 1980s Canadian Apple //e supported displaying French characters, in some variant of Latin-1 I think. The easy extensibility of ASCII on 8-bit-byte systems was a big part of its popularity (and eventually its greatest curse when all the divergent extensions started meeting online). Or just consider how the Japanese put up with computing in pure katakana (their writing system's equivalent of all caps) well into the 1980s.
- coldacid 5y ago
  Most English ligatures (pretty much all other than æ and œ) are simply artifacts of formatting, rather than actual letters. With that in mind, ligature versions of fl and ffl (and the like) are unnecessary.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    There's a person who was involved for years in the maintainance of the venerable CSound audio programming language who specifically changed his last name to ffitch (with a ligature, and no leading capital). I don't know for certain, but I think it was intended to provoke/test/trouble weak text representation in software.
anthk 5y ago
Basque.
int_19h 5y ago
> Is there any language other than English that can be written 100% by ASCII characters Indonesian and Malay languages.
samus 5y ago
Dutch, although they insist on treating the ligature IJ as a letter on its own. It's even part of the sort order in dictionaries and telephone books. Also, probably thanks to Dutch colonialism, the unmodified Latin alphabet is the official writing system in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Singapore, and is used to write the Malay and Indonesian languages. It is also used as the base for romanization systems for languages that don't have a latin-style alphabet already. These are often designed to stick as close to plain lating as possible. Apart from academia and language teaching, a few of them are actually used by governments to render names in latin characters for passports, street signs etc. Personally, I think that the plain latin alphabet is quite limited and that extensions are necessary. Accents, macrons, circumflexes, etc. are certainly annoying to input, but certainly not worse than inventing completely new letters or using digraphs for everything. I rather think that our educational systems don't teach well how to handle them. We don't have to pronounce them all correctly, and certainly can't be expected to, but typing them is not impossible at all!
- Deukhoofd 5y ago
  Dutch can't be fully written in (non extended) ASCII. https://www.opentaal.org/het-laatste-nieuws/171-karakterfrequentie https://www.opentaal.org/het-laatste-nieuws/171-karakterfreq...
kps 5y ago
ASCII was designed to handle the common Western European accents ˊˋˆ˜¨ by overstriking. 0x08 0x60 is not inherently a worse encoding than 0xCC 0x80 for a combining grave accent.