4 ms·

Because that's authoritarian and ghoulish? The thought of forcibly changing (or eliminating) a writing system that may have been in use by millions of people fo

Because that's authoritarian and ghoulish? The thought of forcibly changing (or eliminating) a writing system that may have been in use by millions of people for centuries with no issues, to satisfy the demands of a bunch of web developers who don't want to add some more if-else branches to their text rendering code, gives me the heebie-jeebies. And it wouldn't even save most programmers any effort: for 99.9% of us, this stuff is all abstracted away by libraries anyway. I suspect you might be over-indexing on the specific example of emojis and skin tone modifiers that the article used, but on the Unicode implementation level that's just the same modifier characters that several real languages need to use to be encoded properly. It's not a useless frivolity.

dsego 2y ago
Not sure why writing systems couldn't be improved and simplified for the digital age. It would reduce software complexity and be more efficient and economical.
- MonkeyClub 2y ago
  NewSpeak with NewScript?
- anyfoo 2y ago
  Presumably for the same reason why we're not "just" simplifying English, which is a horribly irregular language, particularly in its orthography. We could simplify English to have similar spelling and pronunciation rules as, say, German, Japanese, Italian, or countless other languages, instead of English's terrible mess. So why are we not just doing that? Funnily, in the case of English, that would likely mean replacing the latin alphabet with a more complicated script. Because in contrast to e.g. German and Italian, that script really does not fit its phonetics very well. Hell, even Japanese romanization, "romaji", makes much better and more consistent use of the latin alphabet than English. Which is just all kinds of funny to me, English is so bad in that regard, that Japanese, a language which is very far away from English in multiple ways, can make so much better use of the to it foreign latin script. In fact, English is so extraordinarily bad in using the latin script, that the English-speaking world even has literal contests about how to spell pronounced words, called "spelling bees". And yet I see no real efforts to simplify that gaining traction.
HPsquared 2y ago
The natural tendency is for language to get simpler as the audience becomes broader, or to suit the technology available at the time/place of writing. It doesn't have to be planned or imposed, it's happening anyway. See the development of English itself, it's basically a creole language, a mix of different influences, and and lost complexities like grammatical gender as a result. Most of the so-called complexity in English is just about scoring "style points", it's not necessary to communicate (other than the admittedly huge vocabulary - again a result of its formation from multiple influences).

dsego 2y ago

Not sure why writing systems couldn't be improved and simplified for the digital age. It would reduce software complexity and be more efficient and economical.

MonkeyClub 2y ago
NewSpeak with NewScript?
anyfoo 2y ago
Presumably for the same reason why we're not "just" simplifying English, which is a horribly irregular language, particularly in its orthography. We could simplify English to have similar spelling and pronunciation rules as, say, German, Japanese, Italian, or countless other languages, instead of English's terrible mess. So why are we not just doing that? Funnily, in the case of English, that would likely mean replacing the latin alphabet with a more complicated script. Because in contrast to e.g. German and Italian, that script really does not fit its phonetics very well. Hell, even Japanese romanization, "romaji", makes much better and more consistent use of the latin alphabet than English. Which is just all kinds of funny to me, English is so bad in that regard, that Japanese, a language which is very far away from English in multiple ways, can make so much better use of the to it foreign latin script. In fact, English is so extraordinarily bad in using the latin script, that the English-speaking world even has literal contests about how to spell pronounced words, called "spelling bees". And yet I see no real efforts to simplify that gaining traction.

HPsquared 2y ago

The natural tendency is for language to get simpler as the audience becomes broader, or to suit the technology available at the time/place of writing. It doesn't have to be planned or imposed, it's happening anyway. See the development of English itself, it's basically a creole language, a mix of different influences, and and lost complexities like grammatical gender as a result. Most of the so-called complexity in English is just about scoring "style points", it's not necessary to communicate (other than the admittedly huge vocabulary - again a result of its formation from multiple influences).