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I feel like Turkish should have been given a different entirely separate lowercase "i" character so the pairs could be consistent, like the Greek lookalikes. Co
by donatj 1y ago
I feel like Turkish should have been given a different entirely separate lowercase "i" character so the pairs could be consistent, like the Greek lookalikes. Considering how historically capital letters came before lowercase it seems like İ should have been considered an entirely separate letter from I.
Greek was given entirely separate characters even though many are indistinguishable from the Latin alphabet. In Greek for instance we have "Ν" lowercases to "ν" instead of "n". The Greek "Ν" however is not a latin "N" and is an entirely separate character. This makes a lot more sense.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoI suspect the Greek alphabet was given special treatment because of just how prominent Greek symbols are in math and science. I posit that engineers and computer scientists gave extra time and attention towards accommodating Greek because they were so familiar with seeing and using those glyphs during their education. They knew that those symbols would be encountered in English, even before full internationalization efforts would take place. Whereas Turkish was merely an afterthought. Edit: This post of mine is unfounded/inaccurate, thank you to dhosek for providing a proper explanation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905574
- donatj 1y agoOh, I don't disagree. Some languages clearly got better treatment by the Unicode committee than others.
- tgv 1y agoTurkish was explicitly based on the Latin script by Atatürk. If Erdogan gets his way, it'll be reverted.
- groos 1y agoWhat a strange statement. Turkish (the Language) existed before the Ataturk's forced conversion into Romanized script and previously used the extended Arabic script. There are other languages which are written in multiple scripts, even outside of computing. In today's world, it's just as possible to type in Arabic as in Romanized Turkish, so whoever wants to do whatever, the capability exists.
- tgv 1y agoI should have written "The Turkish script." I thought that was clear from the context.
- dhosek 1y agoNope, it’s because of how the legacy encodings were handled. See my sibling comment to yours.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoThank you for providing the historical context. I have edited my post and forwarded people to your explanation.
- dhosek 1y agoOne of the design goals of Unicode was lossless roundtrip conversions to and from legacy encodings. Legacy Turkish used the ASCII i for lowercase and a character in the 128–255 range for İ. In contrast, Greek encoded its entire alphabet in the 128–255 range even though, e.g., A and Α have identical appearances (similarly with Cyrillic letters). This legacy use is also why, e.g., Thai and Hindi handle their vowel setting differently (in Thai, vowels are separate characters input in display order, in Hindi they’re spacing marks input in phonetic order¹) although both have their origins in the Brahmi script. ⸻ 1. Some vowels are written before the consonant that they follow phonetically, some come after, a handful come before and after and some are written above or below or modify the shape of the consonant (less sure about this last one—I have meagre Thai skills and almost no Hindi).
- OJFord 1y agoI know nothing of Thai but in Hindi (devanagari) ignoring standalone vowels (अ a) they come after a consonant to modify its pronunciation, regardless of whether the mark is written predominantly before or after or below. E.g. for the consonant k क् (the mark below there indicates no vowel yet): क ka (kuh) का kā (kaa) कि ki (kih) की kī (kee) के ke (kay) कै kai (keh) को ko (koh) कौ kau (kaw) कु ku (koo) कू kū (kooo) I'm not sure about the handwriting stroke order of कि, but digitally you write ki, not ik (because that would be इक - an independent i vowel followed by a ka - 'a' being implicit at the end).
- dhosek 1y agoThai, as a result of its legacy encoding has you write, e,g., โ + อ = โอ even though the vowel โ is pronounced after the consonant อ. And in cases where vowel markings surround the consonant, โ◌ะ, it’s entered as three separate glyphs in display order.