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The main issue I have with these flags is that they are more often than not used to indicate language, not country. But many countries have more than one offici

The main issue I have with these flags is that they are more often than not used to indicate language, not country. But many countries have more than one official language and many languages are official language of more than one country. Not many languages have some official flags though. There is one for Esperanto and Francophonie for example. But while anyone speaking Esperanto will certainly recognize the green flag, it's more dubious that most users would recognize the flag of the OIF. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Esperanto.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Esperanto.sv... https://isolatedtraveller.com/flag-of-organisation-internationale-de-la-francophonie/ https://isolatedtraveller.com/flag-of-organisation-internati...

culi 2y ago
Yup. The top 7 most spoken languages in India are in the top 30 worldwide. And the top 3 in China are in the top 10 worldwide if you split up Cantonese (which is mutually unintelligible from most Mandarin languoids)
- est 2y ago
  sorry but there's no "Cantonese text", both Cantonese and Mandarin are written in Chinese. It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode. (yes I am aware hk people chose to write 粤语白字 in a particular way, because the orthography movement failed in the 70s)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - culi 2y ago
    Now you are mixing up orthographies with languages
  - demetrius 2y ago
    > It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode. Not really, it's more like how both Castlian and Galician people write in Spanish. Spanish is not some magical byte-code that unifies Galician and Castilian. It's Castilian. Galicians just translate their language when they write in Spanish, while Castilians just write the way they speak. Similarly, Written Standard Chinese is not a bytecode, it’s written representation of Mandarin. Both Cantonese and Mandarin have words¹ 看 hon³/kan⁴ and 睇 tai²/di⁴. In Mandarin, the standard word for “to see” is 看 kan⁴. In Cantonese, it's 睇 tai². When Cantonese people replace 睇 tai² with 看 hon⁴ in writing, they *translate* their speech into Written Mandarin, while Mandarin speakers write the way they speak. > because the orthography movement failed in the 70s It's not a matter of orthography. 看 and 睇 are different both in Cantonese and Mandarin, it's not orthographic variant like “colour” and “color”. For example, in Mandarin, you can't replace 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ with 看視 [看视] kan⁴shi⁴, they have different meaning and different reading. They're just different words¹. ____ ¹ Or morphemes. “What is a word” is a complex topic and not relevant here.
    - est 2y ago
      > Cantonese people replace 睇 tai² with 看 hon⁴ in writing OK, since "to see" is a pretty common word, I challenge you to find abandance of evidence where in formal publishing or software UI, every text of 看 was replaced with 睇. > you can't replace 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ with 看視 [看视] kan⁴shi Yes many people use it here and there but not on software UIs like this topic was discussing. And 睇 is not "to see". It means to see sideways. The meaning of 睇 was defined as in 礼记·内则 like "睇，倾视也。" Why are making shit up to appropriate a Chinese word as some kind Cantonese excluse invention and misleading people. More importantly, there does exist another type of written Chinese, simplified vs traditional. Would you proceed to argue HK style writing is Cantonese and not Traditional? Or even further maybe Guangdong and Hongkong cantonese are different "language" ?
      - demetrius 2y ago
        > abandance of evidence where in formal publishing or software UI, every text of 看 was replaced with 睇. How would you even know it was replaced there? It's not like you can compare what the person was saying and what the person ended up writing. In places where you do have access to both Cantonese speech and written text (e.g. movie subtitles), you can easily find such examples. > The meaning of 睇 was defined as in 礼记·内则 like "睇，倾视也。" The meanings change. Look at another word¹ from your example, 也 jaa⁵. 也 jaa⁵ used to be sentence-final marker roughly² corresponding to “to be” (XY也 ≈ X is Y), now it means “also” (我也唔知 = I also don't know). Should we say that 也 jaa⁵ means “is” and not “also”? I don't think it it's useful. Similarly, we shouldn't say 睇 tai² means “to look sideways”: it means “to watch, to read” in modern Cantonese. Just like 也 jaa⁵, it's meaning changed, and it’s OK. That’s how all languages work. (BTW, neither Wikisource's nor Ctext.org's editions of 禮記·內則 even have this phrase. Could you give the link to the version of 禮記·內則 from which you're quoting this?) > Why are making shit up to appropriate a Chinese word as some kind Cantonese excluse invention and misleading people. I'm not saying it’s a Cantonese-only invention. I’m saying 睇 tai² is a standard Cantonese word for “to watch, to read”, and its cognate is not used in this sense in Standard Mandarin. Its cognate is sometimes used in other senses (I even gave an example of 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ in Mandarin), but it’s not a standard word for “to watch, to read” (that's 看 kan⁴ in Mandarin). It's similar to saying that “pas” is a French word for negation³, and it’s not used in this sense in Portuguese. Does it mean meanings (notably, “step”) do not exist? They do! Portuguese does have a cognate of “pas”, “passo”, but it only means “step”, it’s not a negation word. > More importantly, there does exist another type of written Chinese, simplified vs traditional Simplified and Traditional is comparable to Roman and Fraktur in German. Mandarin and Cantonese is comparable to Luxembourgish and High German. You can write Mandarin in both Simplified and Traditional. You can write Cantonese in both Simplified and Traditional script. Similarly, you can write Luxembourgish with Roman and you can write it with Fraktur. You can write High German with Roman and you can write it with Fraktur. The language and character forms are orthogonal. (Even though some forms have more letters than others. E.g. Fraktur distinguishes ſ/s, while Roman type usually doesn't. Likewile, Traditional distinguishes 繫/係, while Simplified doesn't.) > Would you proceed to argue HK style writing is Cantonese and not Traditional? As I've said, these things are orthogonal. Let's look at example of Cologne: Spoken language = Colognian, written language = High German, script = Roman type. (You can write Colognian, but most people translate their speech into High German when writing.) Similarly, in Hong Kong: spoken language = Cantonese, written language = Mandarin, script = Traditional characters. (You can write Cantonese⁴, but most people translate their speech into Mandarin when writing.) (There's also phenomenon of a mixed language with Cantonese pronunciation and Mandarin grammar and words, sometimes called “High Cantonese”. It can be compared to Russian izvod of Church Slavonic: combination of Russian pronunciation with Old Bulgarian grammar and words.) > Or even further maybe Guangdong and Hongkong cantonese are > different "language" ? Guangdong is big. Standard Cantonese, as spoken in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, is clearly the same language. But Hoisanese? Probably divergent enough to be considered a separate language. _____ ¹ Or morpheme. The usual caveats about “what is a word” apply. ² I say “roughly” because Classical Chinese had several words that can be translated “to be”. The pre-Classical phrase for “X is Y” was X誰Y也, where 誰 used to mean “is”, but later disappeared (except when it was extra-stressed to mean “only”), and 也 took the meaning of copula (it was originally a sentence-final marker fo continuous situations). Even in ancient Chinese the meanings were already changing! ³ Interestingly, the development of Classical Chinese meaning of 也 jaa⁵ “to be” (X誰Y → X誰Y[也] → X[誰]Y也) is similar to development of French meaning of pas “not” (X ne Y → X ne Y [pas] → X [ne] Y pas). ⁴ You can find some books in Written Cantonese here: https://cantoneseforfamilies.com/free-online-cantonese-literature/ https://cantoneseforfamilies.com/free-online-cantonese-liter...
lxgr 2y ago
People using national flags to (imprecisely/incorrectly) represent languages is really not the fault of national flags, though.
eviks 2y ago
Are there any good iconic systems you know that identify languages directly?
- Doxin 2y ago
  I don't think such a system does or can exist. e.g. nl-NL is distinct from nl-BE which is distinct from fr-BE. Using a country flag doesn't work if a country uses multiple languages. Languages themselves don't have icons to go with them like countries do, but even if they did it wouldn't distinguish between the same language spoken in different countries, which can matter a lot for how things get localized. nl-NL uses way more words with french roots than nl-BE for example. What I tend to do is have a dropdown with a country icon and language name localized to that language for each language. My pet peeve is trying to switch a website from a language I don't speak into one I do speak and the dropdown listing "Dutch" as "Néerlandais" or whatever instead of "Nederlands". I don't speak french, why would I know what dutch is called in french?
  - eviks 2y ago
    You're slightly confusing dialects with countries (there can be ones not tied to a single country), but more importantly, this places no hard limit on design, you can have icon variations for dialects as well. (and yes, language switching menus you can't understand are dumb, especially for more complicated cases where names don't even look similar, but unfortunately common)
    - wongarsu 2y ago
      As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And even that criterium quickly breaks down at mild scrutiny. And not just because of landlocked countries. Linguists try to draw some lines in the sand, but in the end the reasons we call Swiss German a dialect and Luxemburgish a language are cultural and political.
      - Tomte 2y ago
        > As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy As opposed to a country, which needs an airline and a beer: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/16/beer-airline/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/16/beer-airline/
croisillon 2y ago
i wish there was a unicode version of that thing 文A Wikipedia does for language switch
- spoiler 2y ago
  Not trying to be funny or anything, but you just typed the 文A thing! With some CSS you can make it indistinguishable from an icon
  - croisillon 2y ago
    no, that's a good point but it would need some recognition, a name etc
- dewey 2y ago
  I always find that very confusing, every time I see that in the mobile app (where it's featured pretty prominently) I'm still searching where I can see the other language version before I realize that's the symbol for it. I feel like a globe icon is much more obvious.
  - graypegg 2y ago
    I do feel like it's made slightly more clear if it's stylized like 文<-->A Sorry for the poor attempt at ascii art. But I've seen some arrow indicating swapping/matching between the two characters. And the choice of characters does cover a huge swath of people on earth. (文 for zh_* + jp, and A for every latin, cyrillic and greek alphabet language) Of course that's still missing a huge chunk of people concerned that it might just swap between two languages not including theirs, but as a universal symbol for "translation" it's probably a good bet that the reader recognizes them as "being related to languages" at minimum since they have most certainly interacted with one of those language groups before.
    - RunningDroid 2y ago
      文↔A Unicodified version, some fonts don't render it nice though Screenshot in case HN strips the Unicode: https://i.imgur.com/yeLxyOe.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/yeLxyOe.jpeg
Longhanks 2y ago
Also, transgender is not a country. The flags don't necessarily represent countries.
- walthamstow 2y ago
  Nor is England, if we're being honest with ourselves
  - pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
    What is England, then?
    - walthamstow 2y ago
      A subdivision of the United Kingdom, like Virginia is of the United States.
    - rand0m4r 2y ago
      If France is bacon, maybe England is a sausage /s
nottorp 2y ago
Does a dropdown with flag emojis support searching from the keyboard? It's really annoying when they give you a loong list of countries or languages and you have to scroll through it until you get two pages past the target, then scroll back slowly until you get to one page before the target, repeat until you finally have it in sight...

culi 2y ago

Yup. The top 7 most spoken languages in India are in the top 30 worldwide. And the top 3 in China are in the top 10 worldwide if you split up Cantonese (which is mutually unintelligible from most Mandarin languoids)

est 2y ago
sorry but there's no "Cantonese text", both Cantonese and Mandarin are written in Chinese. It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode. (yes I am aware hk people chose to write 粤语白字 in a particular way, because the orthography movement failed in the 70s)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- culi 2y ago
  Now you are mixing up orthographies with languages
- demetrius 2y ago
  > It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode. Not really, it's more like how both Castlian and Galician people write in Spanish. Spanish is not some magical byte-code that unifies Galician and Castilian. It's Castilian. Galicians just translate their language when they write in Spanish, while Castilians just write the way they speak. Similarly, Written Standard Chinese is not a bytecode, it’s written representation of Mandarin. Both Cantonese and Mandarin have words¹ 看 hon³/kan⁴ and 睇 tai²/di⁴. In Mandarin, the standard word for “to see” is 看 kan⁴. In Cantonese, it's 睇 tai². When Cantonese people replace 睇 tai² with 看 hon⁴ in writing, they *translate* their speech into Written Mandarin, while Mandarin speakers write the way they speak. > because the orthography movement failed in the 70s It's not a matter of orthography. 看 and 睇 are different both in Cantonese and Mandarin, it's not orthographic variant like “colour” and “color”. For example, in Mandarin, you can't replace 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ with 看視 [看视] kan⁴shi⁴, they have different meaning and different reading. They're just different words¹. ____ ¹ Or morphemes. “What is a word” is a complex topic and not relevant here.
  - est 2y ago
    > Cantonese people replace 睇 tai² with 看 hon⁴ in writing OK, since "to see" is a pretty common word, I challenge you to find abandance of evidence where in formal publishing or software UI, every text of 看 was replaced with 睇. > you can't replace 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ with 看視 [看视] kan⁴shi Yes many people use it here and there but not on software UIs like this topic was discussing. And 睇 is not "to see". It means to see sideways. The meaning of 睇 was defined as in 礼记·内则 like "睇，倾视也。" Why are making shit up to appropriate a Chinese word as some kind Cantonese excluse invention and misleading people. More importantly, there does exist another type of written Chinese, simplified vs traditional. Would you proceed to argue HK style writing is Cantonese and not Traditional? Or even further maybe Guangdong and Hongkong cantonese are different "language" ?
    - demetrius 2y ago
      > abandance of evidence where in formal publishing or software UI, every text of 看 was replaced with 睇. How would you even know it was replaced there? It's not like you can compare what the person was saying and what the person ended up writing. In places where you do have access to both Cantonese speech and written text (e.g. movie subtitles), you can easily find such examples. > The meaning of 睇 was defined as in 礼记·内则 like "睇，倾视也。" The meanings change. Look at another word¹ from your example, 也 jaa⁵. 也 jaa⁵ used to be sentence-final marker roughly² corresponding to “to be” (XY也 ≈ X is Y), now it means “also” (我也唔知 = I also don't know). Should we say that 也 jaa⁵ means “is” and not “also”? I don't think it it's useful. Similarly, we shouldn't say 睇 tai² means “to look sideways”: it means “to watch, to read” in modern Cantonese. Just like 也 jaa⁵, it's meaning changed, and it’s OK. That’s how all languages work. (BTW, neither Wikisource's nor Ctext.org's editions of 禮記·內則 even have this phrase. Could you give the link to the version of 禮記·內則 from which you're quoting this?) > Why are making shit up to appropriate a Chinese word as some kind Cantonese excluse invention and misleading people. I'm not saying it’s a Cantonese-only invention. I’m saying 睇 tai² is a standard Cantonese word for “to watch, to read”, and its cognate is not used in this sense in Standard Mandarin. Its cognate is sometimes used in other senses (I even gave an example of 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ in Mandarin), but it’s not a standard word for “to watch, to read” (that's 看 kan⁴ in Mandarin). It's similar to saying that “pas” is a French word for negation³, and it’s not used in this sense in Portuguese. Does it mean meanings (notably, “step”) do not exist? They do! Portuguese does have a cognate of “pas”, “passo”, but it only means “step”, it’s not a negation word. > More importantly, there does exist another type of written Chinese, simplified vs traditional Simplified and Traditional is comparable to Roman and Fraktur in German. Mandarin and Cantonese is comparable to Luxembourgish and High German. You can write Mandarin in both Simplified and Traditional. You can write Cantonese in both Simplified and Traditional script. Similarly, you can write Luxembourgish with Roman and you can write it with Fraktur. You can write High German with Roman and you can write it with Fraktur. The language and character forms are orthogonal. (Even though some forms have more letters than others. E.g. Fraktur distinguishes ſ/s, while Roman type usually doesn't. Likewile, Traditional distinguishes 繫/係, while Simplified doesn't.) > Would you proceed to argue HK style writing is Cantonese and not Traditional? As I've said, these things are orthogonal. Let's look at example of Cologne: Spoken language = Colognian, written language = High German, script = Roman type. (You can write Colognian, but most people translate their speech into High German when writing.) Similarly, in Hong Kong: spoken language = Cantonese, written language = Mandarin, script = Traditional characters. (You can write Cantonese⁴, but most people translate their speech into Mandarin when writing.) (There's also phenomenon of a mixed language with Cantonese pronunciation and Mandarin grammar and words, sometimes called “High Cantonese”. It can be compared to Russian izvod of Church Slavonic: combination of Russian pronunciation with Old Bulgarian grammar and words.) > Or even further maybe Guangdong and Hongkong cantonese are > different "language" ? Guangdong is big. Standard Cantonese, as spoken in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, is clearly the same language. But Hoisanese? Probably divergent enough to be considered a separate language. _____ ¹ Or morpheme. The usual caveats about “what is a word” apply. ² I say “roughly” because Classical Chinese had several words that can be translated “to be”. The pre-Classical phrase for “X is Y” was X誰Y也, where 誰 used to mean “is”, but later disappeared (except when it was extra-stressed to mean “only”), and 也 took the meaning of copula (it was originally a sentence-final marker fo continuous situations). Even in ancient Chinese the meanings were already changing! ³ Interestingly, the development of Classical Chinese meaning of 也 jaa⁵ “to be” (X誰Y → X誰Y[也] → X[誰]Y也) is similar to development of French meaning of pas “not” (X ne Y → X ne Y [pas] → X [ne] Y pas). ⁴ You can find some books in Written Cantonese here: https://cantoneseforfamilies.com/free-online-cantonese-literature/ https://cantoneseforfamilies.com/free-online-cantonese-liter...

lxgr 2y ago

People using national flags to (imprecisely/incorrectly) represent languages is really not the fault of national flags, though.

eviks 2y ago

Are there any good iconic systems you know that identify languages directly?

Doxin 2y ago
I don't think such a system does or can exist. e.g. nl-NL is distinct from nl-BE which is distinct from fr-BE. Using a country flag doesn't work if a country uses multiple languages. Languages themselves don't have icons to go with them like countries do, but even if they did it wouldn't distinguish between the same language spoken in different countries, which can matter a lot for how things get localized. nl-NL uses way more words with french roots than nl-BE for example. What I tend to do is have a dropdown with a country icon and language name localized to that language for each language. My pet peeve is trying to switch a website from a language I don't speak into one I do speak and the dropdown listing "Dutch" as "Néerlandais" or whatever instead of "Nederlands". I don't speak french, why would I know what dutch is called in french?
- eviks 2y ago
  You're slightly confusing dialects with countries (there can be ones not tied to a single country), but more importantly, this places no hard limit on design, you can have icon variations for dialects as well. (and yes, language switching menus you can't understand are dumb, especially for more complicated cases where names don't even look similar, but unfortunately common)
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And even that criterium quickly breaks down at mild scrutiny. And not just because of landlocked countries. Linguists try to draw some lines in the sand, but in the end the reasons we call Swiss German a dialect and Luxemburgish a language are cultural and political.
    - Tomte 2y ago
      > As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy As opposed to a country, which needs an airline and a beer: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/16/beer-airline/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/16/beer-airline/

croisillon 2y ago

i wish there was a unicode version of that thing 文A Wikipedia does for language switch

spoiler 2y ago
Not trying to be funny or anything, but you just typed the 文A thing! With some CSS you can make it indistinguishable from an icon
- croisillon 2y ago
  no, that's a good point but it would need some recognition, a name etc
dewey 2y ago
I always find that very confusing, every time I see that in the mobile app (where it's featured pretty prominently) I'm still searching where I can see the other language version before I realize that's the symbol for it. I feel like a globe icon is much more obvious.
- graypegg 2y ago
  I do feel like it's made slightly more clear if it's stylized like 文<-->A Sorry for the poor attempt at ascii art. But I've seen some arrow indicating swapping/matching between the two characters. And the choice of characters does cover a huge swath of people on earth. (文 for zh_* + jp, and A for every latin, cyrillic and greek alphabet language) Of course that's still missing a huge chunk of people concerned that it might just swap between two languages not including theirs, but as a universal symbol for "translation" it's probably a good bet that the reader recognizes them as "being related to languages" at minimum since they have most certainly interacted with one of those language groups before.
  - RunningDroid 2y ago
    文↔A Unicodified version, some fonts don't render it nice though Screenshot in case HN strips the Unicode: https://i.imgur.com/yeLxyOe.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/yeLxyOe.jpeg

Longhanks 2y ago

Also, transgender is not a country. The flags don't necessarily represent countries.

walthamstow 2y ago
Nor is England, if we're being honest with ourselves
- pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
  What is England, then?
  - walthamstow 2y ago
    A subdivision of the United Kingdom, like Virginia is of the United States.
  - rand0m4r 2y ago
    If France is bacon, maybe England is a sausage /s

nottorp 2y ago

Does a dropdown with flag emojis support searching from the keyboard? It's really annoying when they give you a loong list of countries or languages and you have to scroll through it until you get two pages past the target, then scroll back slowly until you get to one page before the target, repeat until you finally have it in sight...