3 ms·

What could be better? Human languages are complex

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
weinzierl 1y ago
Yes, exactly, human languages are complex and in my opinion Unicode used to be on a good track to tackle these complexities. I just think that nowadays they are not doing enough to help people around the world solving these problems.
- pas 1y ago
  can you describe a few examples? what are you missing? or maybe are you aware of something they rejected that would be useful?
  - weinzierl 1y ago
    The elephant in the room is Han Unification but there are plenty of other issues. Here is one of my favourites from another thread just two days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44971254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44971254 This is the rejected proposal. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2003/03215-n2593-umlaut-trema.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2003/03215-n2593-umlaut-trema.pd... If you read thread from above you will find more examples from other people.
    - pas 1y ago
      thanks! very interesting! ah, and now I understand what the hell people mean when they put dots on coordinate! (but they are obviously wrong they should use the flying point from Catalan :) ... hm, so this issue is easily more than 20 years old. and since then there's no solution (or the German libraries consider the problem "solved" and ... no one else is making proposals to the WG about this nowadays)? also, technically - since there are already more than 150K allocated code points - adding a different combining mark seems the correct way to do, right? or it's now universally accepted that people who want to type ambigüité need to remember to type U+034F before the ü? (... or, of course it's up to their editor/typesetter software to offer this distinction) regarding the Han unification, is there some kind of effort to "fix" that? (adding language-start language-end markers perhaps? or virtual code points for languages to avoid the need for searching strings for the being-end markers?)
pas 1y ago
sure, but they have both human and machine stuff in the same "universe" - again, sure, it made sense, but maybe it would make sense to have a parser that helps to recover "human stuff" from "machine gibberish" (ie. filter out the presentation and control stuff), but, but, of course some in-band logic makes sense, after all, for the combinations (diacritics, emoji skin color, and so on).

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Yes, exactly, human languages are complex and in my opinion Unicode used to be on a good track to tackle these complexities. I just think that nowadays they are not doing enough to help people around the world solving these problems.

pas 1y ago
can you describe a few examples? what are you missing? or maybe are you aware of something they rejected that would be useful?
- weinzierl 1y ago
  The elephant in the room is Han Unification but there are plenty of other issues. Here is one of my favourites from another thread just two days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44971254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44971254 This is the rejected proposal. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2003/03215-n2593-umlaut-trema.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2003/03215-n2593-umlaut-trema.pd... If you read thread from above you will find more examples from other people.
  - pas 1y ago
    thanks! very interesting! ah, and now I understand what the hell people mean when they put dots on coordinate! (but they are obviously wrong they should use the flying point from Catalan :) ... hm, so this issue is easily more than 20 years old. and since then there's no solution (or the German libraries consider the problem "solved" and ... no one else is making proposals to the WG about this nowadays)? also, technically - since there are already more than 150K allocated code points - adding a different combining mark seems the correct way to do, right? or it's now universally accepted that people who want to type ambigüité need to remember to type U+034F before the ü? (... or, of course it's up to their editor/typesetter software to offer this distinction) regarding the Han unification, is there some kind of effort to "fix" that? (adding language-start language-end markers perhaps? or virtual code points for languages to avoid the need for searching strings for the being-end markers?)

pas 1y ago

sure, but they have both human and machine stuff in the same "universe" - again, sure, it made sense, but maybe it would make sense to have a parser that helps to recover "human stuff" from "machine gibberish" (ie. filter out the presentation and control stuff), but, but, of course some in-band logic makes sense, after all, for the combinations (diacritics, emoji skin color, and so on).