4 ms·

Thank you for providing sanity here. Not every problem comes from idiot Americans just being lazy.

dathinab 3y ago
except that the system they mention was (co) created by the US with the US being a major player deciding on the rules it uses...
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  If you mean ASCII, you'll also notice that it happens to correspond pretty well with the entirety of writing symbols which have broad global recognition, and this has been true for a long time. Sure, it's missing many many culturally specific things like accents and other diacritics, non-latin writing systems etc. But none or at least very few of the symbols missing from ASCII are actually broadly understood by people from more than a handful of countries (which can still mean a billion plus people in the case of Chinese, Arabic, and Indian scripts, of course). Probably Arabic is the biggest counterpoint to my claim, as there is quite a large array of countries across two continents that recognize it. However, even there, there are far more people in countries which use Arabic writing that also recognize Latin letters than the other way around. The many diacritics used by various European languages are definitely NOT something that has any wide adoption or meaning. Perhaps only the umlaut sign and the accent are even used by more than one or two European languages. So again, my claim is that any system of writing that is intended for global international communication will have to restrict all names to the A-Z characters in ASCII with spaces as separators (and perhaps 0-9 and a few other characters that would anyway get ignored). Nothing else will work if people around the world are supposed to recognize the name in some meaningful sense. And relying entirely on automated OCR is a no-go for many use cases. And just like people who interact with those outside their cultures have to accept that their name will be pronounced in a myriad of ways, they have no reason not to accept that it will be written in different ways as well.
  - kiwidrew 3y ago
    > it's missing many many culturally specific things like accents and other diacritics fun fact: some of the symbols included in ASCII were intended to be used as (non-spacing) diacritical marks, specifically the tilde/caret/backquote characters... [too lazy to dig up a proper source at the moment but the Wikipedia ASCII article covers some of this]
- ninkendo 3y ago
  You’re missing the point. This is not a technical problem in the first place, as the poster I replied to did a great job explaining.

except that the system they mention was (co) created by the US with the US being a major player deciding on the rules it uses...

tsimionescu 3y ago
If you mean ASCII, you'll also notice that it happens to correspond pretty well with the entirety of writing symbols which have broad global recognition, and this has been true for a long time. Sure, it's missing many many culturally specific things like accents and other diacritics, non-latin writing systems etc. But none or at least very few of the symbols missing from ASCII are actually broadly understood by people from more than a handful of countries (which can still mean a billion plus people in the case of Chinese, Arabic, and Indian scripts, of course). Probably Arabic is the biggest counterpoint to my claim, as there is quite a large array of countries across two continents that recognize it. However, even there, there are far more people in countries which use Arabic writing that also recognize Latin letters than the other way around. The many diacritics used by various European languages are definitely NOT something that has any wide adoption or meaning. Perhaps only the umlaut sign and the accent are even used by more than one or two European languages. So again, my claim is that any system of writing that is intended for global international communication will have to restrict all names to the A-Z characters in ASCII with spaces as separators (and perhaps 0-9 and a few other characters that would anyway get ignored). Nothing else will work if people around the world are supposed to recognize the name in some meaningful sense. And relying entirely on automated OCR is a no-go for many use cases. And just like people who interact with those outside their cultures have to accept that their name will be pronounced in a myriad of ways, they have no reason not to accept that it will be written in different ways as well.
- kiwidrew 3y ago
  > it's missing many many culturally specific things like accents and other diacritics fun fact: some of the symbols included in ASCII were intended to be used as (non-spacing) diacritical marks, specifically the tilde/caret/backquote characters... [too lazy to dig up a proper source at the moment but the Wikipedia ASCII article covers some of this]
ninkendo 3y ago
You’re missing the point. This is not a technical problem in the first place, as the poster I replied to did a great job explaining.