4 ms·

The distinction between normal language and graphical representation is the same as what is clipart and what is a official part of a language. Is poo a letter?

• sho_hn 12y ago
  But 粪 is also a character and means poo as well. It might not look like poo to you, but there's also examples of pictograms in the same script: 田 means field and looks like one. Of course these are "official part of a language". But why? Under whose authority? You could cite "actual usage", but many of the emoji in Unicode certainly have seen actual usage for 10+ years in East Asia, so they qualify. And many of the letters in Unicode were in fact designed by committee prior to mass adoption by an actual population (for example the Hangul alphabet), so a lot of scripts already in Unicode originally didn't meet that barrier. * = Letters vs. characters: Elements of alphabets are referred to as letters. Alphabets are graphical representations of phonemes, but many other writing systems encode syllables (syllabaries, like the Japanese kana), morphemes or words (logographies) instead. Unicode contains examples of all of these, and thus not just letters. So we want to talk about characters instead.
  • buster 12y ago
    Oh, the irony: http://oi60.tinypic.com/21o111t.jpg http://oi60.tinypic.com/21o111t.jpg That's pretty much my point.
    • sho_hn 12y ago
      For the record, the example was a Chinese character, which qualifies as "normal" according to the rulebook you set up. It's in active use in Mandarin and Japanese, and I'd think recognizable to many others (e.g. Cantonese readers or Koreans and Vietnamese). And it'll certainly show just fine on the default installs of most systems on the market right now. http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=7CAA http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=7C... You're just being petty or culturally arrogant at this point, TBH.
      • buster 12y ago
        The point is that it will never happen that all codepoints are available everywhere (every font, evers OS, every device), and i certainly don't want a gazillion of pictures loaded on my smartphones little memory, just because some people think it necessary to have a symbol for poop in fonts which is never used anyway. I even consider it a total waste in my laptops 16GB of memory, to be honest. It's not a waste when it serves the real purpose of a language. A chinese word for poop? Sure. A picture of actual poop? No. And where does it stop? Can i have some dog poop and cat poop codepoints please? I'm sure elephant poop looks very different to cat poop, i want a code point for that too. I say it again: If you want pictures and cliparts, use .png. If you want to write actual text, use fonts. It's as simple as that.
        • scrollaway 12y ago
          If you think using pngs instead of fonts is going to save your oh-so-precious mobile device's memory, you got another thing coming.
          • buster 12y ago
            Which only shows that you know nothing. A unicode font can come in at about 20MB, but let's add more tiny pictures and make it 100MB, so that i can see the snowman on your webpage (which would be probably 2-5 kB as png). Why should my browser load thousands of pictures that are never used?! Yes, it's ridiculous.
            • scrollaway 12y ago
              > A unicode font can come in at about 20MB, but let's add more tiny pictures and make it 100MB You're pulling numbers out of your ass. You also clearly don't know how font fallbacks work, despite having been told how they work in this very thread. Several times.
              • buster 12y ago
                No, Arial Unicode MS: 22,1 MB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font And you clearly don't understand that a) this thread contains unicode that my browser still doesn't show, despite your magic fallback and b) the fonts stil contain garbage that has nothing to do with fonts.
    • acdha 12y ago
      So you're using Windows XP or something similarly mired in the 90s which doesn't have fonts installed with glyphs for a standard character. That's bad for you and a small number of other people but that hardly says it's not useful to the billion or so people who can read Chinese. The nice part about having it Unicode is that if you copy and paste that character somewhere else, it'll still work. It never goes through what we used to have to deal where the same character value couldn't reliably be processed without knowing the intended encoding with certainty.
      • buster 12y ago
        No, Chrome, Debian testing.