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I have always wondered why Turkey chose to Latinize in this way. I understand that the issue is having two similar vowels in Turkish, but not why they decided t

I have always wondered why Turkey chose to Latinize in this way. I understand that the issue is having two similar vowels in Turkish, but not why they decided to invent the dotless I, when other diacritics already existed. Ĭ Î Ï Í Ì Į Ĩ and almost certainly a dozen other would've worked, unless there was already some significance to the dot in Turkish that's not obvious.

mrighele 1y ago
The issue is not the invention of the dotless I, it already exists, the issue is that the took a vowerl , i/I, and the assigned the lower case to one vowel, and the upper case to a different one, and invented what left missing. It's like they decided that the uppercase of "a" is "E" and the uppercase of "e" is "A".
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  This is misleading, because it assumes that i/I naturally represent one vowel, which is just not the case. i/I represents one vowel in _English_, when written with a latin script. ̶I̶n̶ ̶f̶a̶c̶t̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶r̶r̶e̶c̶t̶,̶ ̶i̶/̶I̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶r̶e̶s̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶p̶h̶o̶n̶e̶m̶e̶,̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶v̶o̶w̶e̶l̶.̶ <see troad's comment for correction> There is no reason to assume that the English representation is in general "correct", "standard", or even "first". The modern script for Turkish was adopted around the 1920's, so you could argue perhaps that most typewriters presented a standard that should have been followed. However, there was variation even between different typewriters, and I strongly suspect that typewriters weren't common in Turkey when the change was made.
  - ginko 1y ago
    >This is misleading, because it assumes that i/I naturally represent one vowel, which is just not the case. It does in literally any language using a latin alphabet other than Turkish.
    - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
      This may be correct, I'd have to do a 'real' search, which I'm too lazy to do, lol sorry. However there are definitely other (non-latin) scripts that have either i or I, but for which i/I is not a correct pair. For example, greek has ι/Ι too.
    - okanat 1y ago
      All other Turkic languages also copied this for their Latin script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotless_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotless_I
  - troad 1y ago
    > In fact even this isn't correct, i/I represents one phoneme, not one vowel. Not quite. In English, 'i' and 'I' are two allographs of one grapheme, corresponding to many phonemes, based on context. (Using linguistic definitions here, not compsci ones.) The 'i's in 'kit' and 'kite' stand for different phonemes, for example. > There is no reason to assume that the English representation is in general "correct", "standard", or even "first". Correct, but the I/i allography is not exclusive to English. Every Latin script functions that way, other than Turkish and Turkish-derived scripts. No one is saying Turkish cannot break from that convention - they can feel free to do anything they like - but the resulting issues are fairly predictable, and their adverse effects fall mainly on Turkish speakers in practice, not on the rest of us.
    - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
      > Not quite. In English, 'i' and 'I' are two allographs of one grapheme, corresponding to many phonemes, based on context. (Using linguistic definitions here, not compsci ones.) The 'i's in 'kit' and 'kite' stand for different phonemes, for example. You're right, apologies my linguistics is rusty and I was overconfident. > Correct, but the I/i allography is not exclusive to English. Every Latin script functions that way, other than Turkish and Turkish-derived scripts. I think my main argument is that the importance of standardizing to i/I was much less obvious in the 1920's. The benefits are obvious to us now, but I think we would be hard pressed to predict this outcome a-priori.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - Muromec 1y ago
      > but the resulting issues are fairly predictable, and their adverse effects fall mainly on Turkish speakers in practice, not on the rest of us. I don't think it's fair to call it predictable. When this convention was chosen, the problem of "what is the uppercase letter to I" was always bound to the context of language. Now it suddenly isn't. Shikata ga nai. It wasn't even an explicit assumption that can be reflected upon, it was an implicit one, that just happened.
- steezeburger 1y ago
  I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it. It’s not like they were Latinizing Turkish with ASCII in mind. They wanted a one-to-one mapping between letters and sounds. The dot versus no dot marks where in your mouth or throat the vowel is formed. They didn’t have this concept that capital I automatically pairs with lowercase i. The dot was always part of the letter itself. The reform wasn’t trying to fit existing Western conventions, it was trying to map the Turkish sounds to symbols.
  - LudwigNagasena 1y ago
    They switched from Arabic script to Latin script. They literally did latinize Turkish, but they ditched the convention of 1 to 1 correspondence between lowercase and uppercase letters that is invariant across all languages that use Latin script except for German script, Turkish script and its offspring Azerbaijani script.
    - cachius 1y ago
      > correspondence between lowercase and uppercase [not in] German script Where is it broken in German script? Do you mean small ß and capital ẞ?
      - LudwigNagasena 1y ago
        Yes, ẞ is an optional variant of ß, which is traditionally capitalized as SS.
    - steezeburger 1y ago
      I was just saying they didn't do that with ASCII in mind. I was not saying they didn't Latinize.
- okanat 1y ago
  Not really. Turkish has a feature that is called "vowel harmony". You match suffixes you add to a word based on a category system: low pitch vs high pitch vowels where a,ı,o,u are low pitch and e,i,ö,ü are high pitch. Ö and ü were already borrowed from German alphabet. Umlaut-added variants of 'ö' and 'ü' have a similar effect on 'o' and 'u' respectively: they bring a back vowel to front. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel . Similarly removing the dots bring them back. Turkish already had i sound and its back variant which is a schwa-like sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_unrounded_vowel . It has the same relation in IPA as 'ö' has to 'o' and 'ü' has to 'u'. Since the makers of the Turkish variant of Latin Alphabet had the rare chance of making a regular pronunciation system with the state of the language and since removing the dots had the effect of making a front vowel a back vowel, they simply copied this feature from ö and ü to i: Just remove the dots to make it a back vowel! Now we have ı. When comes to capitalization, ö becomes Ö, ü becomes Ü. So it is just logical to make the capital of i İ and the lowercase of I ı.
  - ithkuil 1y ago
    Yes it's hard to come up with a different capital than I unless you somehow can see into the future and foresee the advent of computers, which the Turkish alphabet reform predates. Of course the latin capital I is dotless because originally the lowercase latin "i" was also dotless. The dot has been added later to make text more legible.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > low pitch vs high pitch vowels where a,ı,o,u are low pitch and e,i,ö,ü are high pitch. Does that reflect the Turkish terminology? Ordinarily you would call o and u "high" while a and e are "low". The distinction between o/u and ö/ü is the other dimension: o/u are "back" while ö/ü are "front".
    - selcuka 1y ago
      > Does that reflect the Turkish terminology? Yes. The Turkish terms are "kalın ünlü" and "ince ünlü". They literally translate to "low pitch wovel"/"high pitch wovel" )(or "thick wovel"/"thin wovel") in this context. There is a second wovel harmony rule [1] (called lesser wovel harmony) that makes the distinction you pointed out. Letters a/e/ı/i are called flat wovels, and o/ö/u/ü are called round wovels. [1] https://georgiasomethingyouknowwhatever.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/turkish-phonology-vowel-harmony/ https://georgiasomethingyouknowwhatever.wordpress.com/2015/0...
- ozgung 1y ago
  Nope, we decided to do it the correct and logical way for our alphabet. Some glyphs are either dotted or dotless. So, we have Iı, İi, Oo, Öö, Uu, Üü, Cc, Çç, Ss and Şş. You see the Ii pair is actually the odd one in the series. Also, we don't have serifs in our I. It's just a straight line. So, it's not even related to your Ii pair in English. You can't dictate how we write our straight lines, can you. The root cause of the problem is in the implementation and standardization of the computer systems. Computers are originally designed only for English alphabet in mind. And patched to support other languages over time, poorly. Computers should obey the language rules, not the other way around.
  - zettabomb 1y ago
    >Also, we don't have serifs in our I. That depends on font. >So, it's not even related to your Ii pair in English. Modern Turkish uses the Latin script, of course it's related. >You can't dictate how we write our straight lines, can you. No, I can't, I just want to understand why the Turks decided to change this letter, and this letter only, from the rest of the standard Latin script/diacritics.
    - ozgung 1y ago
      > I just want to understand why the Turks decided to change this letter, and this letter only Because Turkish uses a phonetic alphabet suited for Turkish sounds, based on latin letters. There are 8 vovels come in two subsets: AIOU and EİÖÜ. When you pair them with zip(), pairs are phonetically related sounds but totally different letters at the same time. Turkish also uses suffixes for everything, and vowels in these suffixes sometimes change between these two subgroups. This design lets me write any word uniquely and almost correctly using the Turkish alphabet. Dis dizayn lets mi rayt ani vörd yüniğkli end olmost koreğtkli yuzing dı törkiş alfabet. Ö is the dotted version of O. İ is the dotted version of I. Related but different. Their lower case versions are logically (not by historical convention): öoiı. So we didn’t just wanted to change I, and only I. We just added dots. Since there are no Oö pair in any language our OoÖö vovels didn’t get the same attention. Same for our Ğğ and Şş. I hope this answers the question.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
ayhanfuat 1y ago
Except for the a/e pair, front and back vowels have dotted and dotless versions in Turkish: ı and i, o and ö, u and ü.
- zettabomb 1y ago
  Makes sense enough, but why not use i and ï to be consistent?
  - okanat 1y ago
    Turkish i/İ sounds pretty similar to most of the European languages. Italian, French and German pronounce it pretty similar. Also removing umlauts from the other two vowels ö and ü to write o and u has the same effect as removing the dot from i. It is just consistent.
    - zettabomb 1y ago
      No, what I mean is, o and u get an umlaut (two dots) to become ö and ü, but i doesn't get an umlaut, it's just a single dot from ı to i. Why not make it i and ï? That would be more consistent, in my opinion.
      - selcuka 1y ago
        I guess the aim was to reuse as much of the standard Latin alphabet as possible. A better solution would have been to leave i/I as they are (similar to j/J), and introduce a new lowercase/uppercase letter pair for "ı", such as Iota (ɩ/Ɩ).
      - zahlman 1y ago
        See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45564152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45564152.
  - ayhanfuat 1y ago
    This was shortly after the Turkish War of Independence. Illiteracy was quite high (estimated at over 85%) and the country was still being rebuilt. My guess is they did their best to represent all the sounds while creating a one to one mapping between sounds and letters but also not deviating too much from familiar forms. There were probably conflicting goals so inconsistencies were bound to happen.
nurettin 1y ago
There was actually three! i (as in th[i]s), î (as in ch[ee]se) and ı which sounds nothing like the first two, it sounds something like the e in bag[e]l. I guess it sounded so different that it warranted such a drastic symbolic change.
- ithkuil 1y ago
  Turkish exhibits a vowel harmony system and uses diacritics on other vowels too and the choice to put "i" together with other front vowels like "ü" and "ö" and put "ı" together with back vowels like "u" and "o" is actually pretty elegant. The latinization reform of the Turkish language predates computers and it was hard to foresee the woes that future generations would have had with that choice
jeroenhd 1y ago
Computers and localisation weren't relevant back in the early 20th century. The dotless existed before the dotted i (in Greek script as iota). Some European scholars putting an extra dot on the letter to make it stand out a bit more are as much to blame as the Turks for making the distinction between the different i-vowels clear. Really, this bug is nothing but programmers failing to take into account that not everybody writes in English.
- jagrsw 1y ago
  > that not everybody writes in English. I don't know... I understand the history and reasons for this capitalization behavior in Turkish, and my native language isn't English, which had to use a lot of strange encodings before the introduction of UTF-8. But messing around with the capitalization of ASCII <= codepoint(127) is a risky business, in my opinion. These codepoints are explicitly named: "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I" "LATIN SMALL LETTER I" and requiring them to not match exactly during capitalization/diminuitization sounds very risky.
- JuniperMesos 1y ago
  It's not exactly programmers failing to take into account that no everybody writes in English - if that were the case, then it would simply be impossible to represent the Turkish lowercase-dotless and uppercase-dotted I at all. The actual problem is failing to take into account that operations on text strings that work in one language's writing might not work the same way in a different language's writing system. There's a lot of languages in the world that use the Latin writing system, and even if you are personally a fluent speaker and writer of several of them, you might simply have not learned about Turkish's specific behavior with I.
- troad 1y ago
  > Really, this bug is nothing but programmers failing to take into account that not everybody writes in English. This bug is the exact opposite of that. The program would have worked fine had it used pure ASCII transforms (±0x20); it was the use of library functions that did in fact take Turkish into account that caused the problem. More broadly, this is not an easy issue to solve. If a Turkish programmer writes code, what is the expected behaviour for metaprogramming and compilers? Are the function names in English or Turkish? What about variables, object members, struct fields? You could have one variable name that references some government ID number using its native Turkish name, right next to another variable name that uses the English "ID". How does the compiler know what locale to use for which symbol? Boiling all of this down to 'just be more considerate' is not actually constructive or actionable.

mrighele 1y ago

The issue is not the invention of the dotless I, it already exists, the issue is that the took a vowerl , i/I, and the assigned the lower case to one vowel, and the upper case to a different one, and invented what left missing. It's like they decided that the uppercase of "a" is "E" and the uppercase of "e" is "A".

pinkmuffinere 1y ago
This is misleading, because it assumes that i/I naturally represent one vowel, which is just not the case. i/I represents one vowel in _English_, when written with a latin script. ̶I̶n̶ ̶f̶a̶c̶t̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶r̶r̶e̶c̶t̶,̶ ̶i̶/̶I̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶r̶e̶s̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶p̶h̶o̶n̶e̶m̶e̶,̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶v̶o̶w̶e̶l̶.̶ <see troad's comment for correction> There is no reason to assume that the English representation is in general "correct", "standard", or even "first". The modern script for Turkish was adopted around the 1920's, so you could argue perhaps that most typewriters presented a standard that should have been followed. However, there was variation even between different typewriters, and I strongly suspect that typewriters weren't common in Turkey when the change was made.
- ginko 1y ago
  >This is misleading, because it assumes that i/I naturally represent one vowel, which is just not the case. It does in literally any language using a latin alphabet other than Turkish.
  - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    This may be correct, I'd have to do a 'real' search, which I'm too lazy to do, lol sorry. However there are definitely other (non-latin) scripts that have either i or I, but for which i/I is not a correct pair. For example, greek has ι/Ι too.
  - okanat 1y ago
    All other Turkic languages also copied this for their Latin script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotless_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotless_I
- troad 1y ago
  > In fact even this isn't correct, i/I represents one phoneme, not one vowel. Not quite. In English, 'i' and 'I' are two allographs of one grapheme, corresponding to many phonemes, based on context. (Using linguistic definitions here, not compsci ones.) The 'i's in 'kit' and 'kite' stand for different phonemes, for example. > There is no reason to assume that the English representation is in general "correct", "standard", or even "first". Correct, but the I/i allography is not exclusive to English. Every Latin script functions that way, other than Turkish and Turkish-derived scripts. No one is saying Turkish cannot break from that convention - they can feel free to do anything they like - but the resulting issues are fairly predictable, and their adverse effects fall mainly on Turkish speakers in practice, not on the rest of us.
  - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    > Not quite. In English, 'i' and 'I' are two allographs of one grapheme, corresponding to many phonemes, based on context. (Using linguistic definitions here, not compsci ones.) The 'i's in 'kit' and 'kite' stand for different phonemes, for example. You're right, apologies my linguistics is rusty and I was overconfident. > Correct, but the I/i allography is not exclusive to English. Every Latin script functions that way, other than Turkish and Turkish-derived scripts. I think my main argument is that the importance of standardizing to i/I was much less obvious in the 1920's. The benefits are obvious to us now, but I think we would be hard pressed to predict this outcome a-priori.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - Muromec 1y ago
    > but the resulting issues are fairly predictable, and their adverse effects fall mainly on Turkish speakers in practice, not on the rest of us. I don't think it's fair to call it predictable. When this convention was chosen, the problem of "what is the uppercase letter to I" was always bound to the context of language. Now it suddenly isn't. Shikata ga nai. It wasn't even an explicit assumption that can be reflected upon, it was an implicit one, that just happened.
steezeburger 1y ago
I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it. It’s not like they were Latinizing Turkish with ASCII in mind. They wanted a one-to-one mapping between letters and sounds. The dot versus no dot marks where in your mouth or throat the vowel is formed. They didn’t have this concept that capital I automatically pairs with lowercase i. The dot was always part of the letter itself. The reform wasn’t trying to fit existing Western conventions, it was trying to map the Turkish sounds to symbols.
- LudwigNagasena 1y ago
  They switched from Arabic script to Latin script. They literally did latinize Turkish, but they ditched the convention of 1 to 1 correspondence between lowercase and uppercase letters that is invariant across all languages that use Latin script except for German script, Turkish script and its offspring Azerbaijani script.
  - cachius 1y ago
    > correspondence between lowercase and uppercase [not in] German script Where is it broken in German script? Do you mean small ß and capital ẞ?
    - LudwigNagasena 1y ago
      Yes, ẞ is an optional variant of ß, which is traditionally capitalized as SS.
  - steezeburger 1y ago
    I was just saying they didn't do that with ASCII in mind. I was not saying they didn't Latinize.
okanat 1y ago
Not really. Turkish has a feature that is called "vowel harmony". You match suffixes you add to a word based on a category system: low pitch vs high pitch vowels where a,ı,o,u are low pitch and e,i,ö,ü are high pitch. Ö and ü were already borrowed from German alphabet. Umlaut-added variants of 'ö' and 'ü' have a similar effect on 'o' and 'u' respectively: they bring a back vowel to front. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel . Similarly removing the dots bring them back. Turkish already had i sound and its back variant which is a schwa-like sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_unrounded_vowel . It has the same relation in IPA as 'ö' has to 'o' and 'ü' has to 'u'. Since the makers of the Turkish variant of Latin Alphabet had the rare chance of making a regular pronunciation system with the state of the language and since removing the dots had the effect of making a front vowel a back vowel, they simply copied this feature from ö and ü to i: Just remove the dots to make it a back vowel! Now we have ı. When comes to capitalization, ö becomes Ö, ü becomes Ü. So it is just logical to make the capital of i İ and the lowercase of I ı.
- ithkuil 1y ago
  Yes it's hard to come up with a different capital than I unless you somehow can see into the future and foresee the advent of computers, which the Turkish alphabet reform predates. Of course the latin capital I is dotless because originally the lowercase latin "i" was also dotless. The dot has been added later to make text more legible.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > low pitch vs high pitch vowels where a,ı,o,u are low pitch and e,i,ö,ü are high pitch. Does that reflect the Turkish terminology? Ordinarily you would call o and u "high" while a and e are "low". The distinction between o/u and ö/ü is the other dimension: o/u are "back" while ö/ü are "front".
  - selcuka 1y ago
    > Does that reflect the Turkish terminology? Yes. The Turkish terms are "kalın ünlü" and "ince ünlü". They literally translate to "low pitch wovel"/"high pitch wovel" )(or "thick wovel"/"thin wovel") in this context. There is a second wovel harmony rule [1] (called lesser wovel harmony) that makes the distinction you pointed out. Letters a/e/ı/i are called flat wovels, and o/ö/u/ü are called round wovels. [1] https://georgiasomethingyouknowwhatever.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/turkish-phonology-vowel-harmony/ https://georgiasomethingyouknowwhatever.wordpress.com/2015/0...
ozgung 1y ago
Nope, we decided to do it the correct and logical way for our alphabet. Some glyphs are either dotted or dotless. So, we have Iı, İi, Oo, Öö, Uu, Üü, Cc, Çç, Ss and Şş. You see the Ii pair is actually the odd one in the series. Also, we don't have serifs in our I. It's just a straight line. So, it's not even related to your Ii pair in English. You can't dictate how we write our straight lines, can you. The root cause of the problem is in the implementation and standardization of the computer systems. Computers are originally designed only for English alphabet in mind. And patched to support other languages over time, poorly. Computers should obey the language rules, not the other way around.
- zettabomb 1y ago
  >Also, we don't have serifs in our I. That depends on font. >So, it's not even related to your Ii pair in English. Modern Turkish uses the Latin script, of course it's related. >You can't dictate how we write our straight lines, can you. No, I can't, I just want to understand why the Turks decided to change this letter, and this letter only, from the rest of the standard Latin script/diacritics.
  - ozgung 1y ago
    > I just want to understand why the Turks decided to change this letter, and this letter only Because Turkish uses a phonetic alphabet suited for Turkish sounds, based on latin letters. There are 8 vovels come in two subsets: AIOU and EİÖÜ. When you pair them with zip(), pairs are phonetically related sounds but totally different letters at the same time. Turkish also uses suffixes for everything, and vowels in these suffixes sometimes change between these two subgroups. This design lets me write any word uniquely and almost correctly using the Turkish alphabet. Dis dizayn lets mi rayt ani vörd yüniğkli end olmost koreğtkli yuzing dı törkiş alfabet. Ö is the dotted version of O. İ is the dotted version of I. Related but different. Their lower case versions are logically (not by historical convention): öoiı. So we didn’t just wanted to change I, and only I. We just added dots. Since there are no Oö pair in any language our OoÖö vovels didn’t get the same attention. Same for our Ğğ and Şş. I hope this answers the question.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago

ayhanfuat 1y ago

Except for the a/e pair, front and back vowels have dotted and dotless versions in Turkish: ı and i, o and ö, u and ü.

zettabomb 1y ago
Makes sense enough, but why not use i and ï to be consistent?
- okanat 1y ago
  Turkish i/İ sounds pretty similar to most of the European languages. Italian, French and German pronounce it pretty similar. Also removing umlauts from the other two vowels ö and ü to write o and u has the same effect as removing the dot from i. It is just consistent.
  - zettabomb 1y ago
    No, what I mean is, o and u get an umlaut (two dots) to become ö and ü, but i doesn't get an umlaut, it's just a single dot from ı to i. Why not make it i and ï? That would be more consistent, in my opinion.
    - selcuka 1y ago
      I guess the aim was to reuse as much of the standard Latin alphabet as possible. A better solution would have been to leave i/I as they are (similar to j/J), and introduce a new lowercase/uppercase letter pair for "ı", such as Iota (ɩ/Ɩ).
    - zahlman 1y ago
      See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45564152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45564152.
- ayhanfuat 1y ago
  This was shortly after the Turkish War of Independence. Illiteracy was quite high (estimated at over 85%) and the country was still being rebuilt. My guess is they did their best to represent all the sounds while creating a one to one mapping between sounds and letters but also not deviating too much from familiar forms. There were probably conflicting goals so inconsistencies were bound to happen.

nurettin 1y ago

There was actually three! i (as in th[i]s), î (as in ch[ee]se) and ı which sounds nothing like the first two, it sounds something like the e in bag[e]l. I guess it sounded so different that it warranted such a drastic symbolic change.

ithkuil 1y ago
Turkish exhibits a vowel harmony system and uses diacritics on other vowels too and the choice to put "i" together with other front vowels like "ü" and "ö" and put "ı" together with back vowels like "u" and "o" is actually pretty elegant. The latinization reform of the Turkish language predates computers and it was hard to foresee the woes that future generations would have had with that choice

jeroenhd 1y ago

Computers and localisation weren't relevant back in the early 20th century. The dotless existed before the dotted i (in Greek script as iota). Some European scholars putting an extra dot on the letter to make it stand out a bit more are as much to blame as the Turks for making the distinction between the different i-vowels clear. Really, this bug is nothing but programmers failing to take into account that not everybody writes in English.

jagrsw 1y ago
> that not everybody writes in English. I don't know... I understand the history and reasons for this capitalization behavior in Turkish, and my native language isn't English, which had to use a lot of strange encodings before the introduction of UTF-8. But messing around with the capitalization of ASCII <= codepoint(127) is a risky business, in my opinion. These codepoints are explicitly named: "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I" "LATIN SMALL LETTER I" and requiring them to not match exactly during capitalization/diminuitization sounds very risky.
JuniperMesos 1y ago
It's not exactly programmers failing to take into account that no everybody writes in English - if that were the case, then it would simply be impossible to represent the Turkish lowercase-dotless and uppercase-dotted I at all. The actual problem is failing to take into account that operations on text strings that work in one language's writing might not work the same way in a different language's writing system. There's a lot of languages in the world that use the Latin writing system, and even if you are personally a fluent speaker and writer of several of them, you might simply have not learned about Turkish's specific behavior with I.
troad 1y ago
> Really, this bug is nothing but programmers failing to take into account that not everybody writes in English. This bug is the exact opposite of that. The program would have worked fine had it used pure ASCII transforms (±0x20); it was the use of library functions that did in fact take Turkish into account that caused the problem. More broadly, this is not an easy issue to solve. If a Turkish programmer writes code, what is the expected behaviour for metaprogramming and compilers? Are the function names in English or Turkish? What about variables, object members, struct fields? You could have one variable name that references some government ID number using its native Turkish name, right next to another variable name that uses the English "ID". How does the compiler know what locale to use for which symbol? Boiling all of this down to 'just be more considerate' is not actually constructive or actionable.