4 ms·

Clearly tongue-in-cheek, and informative. So nice somehow. But still: the fact that English phonology and orthography are only lightly related, and hardly anyo

by jng 12y ago

Clearly tongue-in-cheek, and informative. So nice somehow. But still: the fact that English phonology and orthography are only lightly related, and hardly anyone is willing to do the effort to fix this, should give the author second thoughts on complaining about others' artifacts and not complaining about the ones in English. Many languages have pure or nearly-pure phonetic orthographies, which are a pleasure to use. English could have one. And as the de-facto international language, it would help make everyone's life better. And it just won't happen.

sho_hn 12y ago
> and informative. There's a lot of half-knowledge and misdirection in this blog post, though. * Languages aren't writing systems, and vice-versa. * There are often decent reasons and upsides to the things he calls out as sucking. His rant on Hangul, for example - for human users, the morpho-syllabic grouping of letters into blocks in Korean writing tends to be beneficial, because they make the orthography of morphemes in different contexts more regular and morpheme reuse smoother. I also tend to consider the way Hangul is implemented in Unicode actually quite clever (you can use a formula to map from the code points of the individual letters to the code points of the pre-composed blocks). (I've contrasted Chinese and Hangul a little in this LWN comment: http://lwn.net/Articles/608260/ http://lwn.net/Articles/608260/) * The German ß isn't a simple ligature for 'ss'. It has a different history, an orthographic dimension and also serves as a useful prounciation hint. * Point 5, "The width of a character depends on context", is full of half-knowledge. First of, it's not "Jamo vowel" - 자모 (ja-mo) is the Korean word for "letter", so it's "vowel jamo" if anything. The alphabet is called 한글 (han-gul). Second, combining characters aren't in any way unique to Asian scripts in Unicode. Unicode contains separate code points for the individual Hangul letters and the blocks they can be combined into. Unicode also contains separate code points for Latin letters and the various diacritics and accents they combine with in Latin-derived Western scripts, along with code points for those combinations. For human users, these sort of consistent combinatorics in a script are a boon, and that Unicode chooses to represent both primitive elements and combined versions is a general trait of Unicode. In general, the thrust here is "your writing systems sucks for me while doing my job", which is subject to this guy's performance and qualifications. It's not the same as "writing system sucks for its users". I find the specter of stuff like this catching on as memes among linguistically and culturally ignorant hackers (because hey, we write English, so we're in the doing-it-right camp, right?) frightening, because programmer convenience is only one factor among many, and most likely not the most important one.
- bane 12y ago
  I think your points are correct. However, it really is difficult and requires lots of specialized domain knowledge to properly support a big group of the world's languages. I'd almost go so far as to hire a specialist developer just to do international character handling if that was a requirement of the software.
  - sho_hn 12y ago
    It is difficult and does require some learning, yeah. In fact, it's more difficult than the article hints at, because while it falsely speaks of languages it's actually only concerned with writing systems, and a lot of the more interesting localization problems happen on the actual language/grammar level (for example, plain gettext isn't good enough to handle Korean post-positions, so we try to do better[1] in KDE). But we can and have built reusable tools to shoulder much of the burden, and because these problems are so fundamental and culture-enabling, it can actually be a really rewarding and satisfying area to work in. In fact, I bet if you catch the author on a better day, I wonder if he wouldn't agree. 1 = https://techbase.kde.org/Localization/Concepts/Transcript#Korean_Postpositions https://techbase.kde.org/Localization/Concepts/Transcript#Ko...
  - Argorak 12y ago
    Yes. You probably should. But there is no point in ranting, the same is true if you want a good graphics system.
- clairity 12y ago
  i think the blocks-as-syllables concept in hangul makes lots of sense. that, and the straightforward mapping of letters to the english alphabet, made it fairly easy to learn how to read korean. understanding what you're reading is a completely different matter however.
  - sho_hn 12y ago
    The funky part being that the blocks aren't just syllables, the boundaries between blocks often correspond to the boundaries between morphemes, because of how the phonotactics of the language have evolved and Hangul was designed to fit them. To use English as an example, the word "cats" contains two morphemes, the stem "cat" and the plural suffix "s". In Korean+Hangul, this sort of combination tends to split neatly into blocks, and when there are multiple options for how the letters can be distributed over them, the orthography usually prefers the variant that keeps the morpheme spelled consistently everywhere. This gives the writing a neat sort of lego blocks feel. There's plenty of other nifty traits to Hangul, such as the way many letters derive from each other graphically and thus lend themselves to two-step entry and reduced-number-of-keys inputs like keypads. And the design of the letters is featural, not arbitrary, that is they are often visualizations of tongue position or mouth shape when forming the respective sound. The theme here is: There are many other concerns when it comes to the quality of a writing system. What the author is concerned with here isn't entirely unimportant, but a very, very narrow view.
bane 12y ago
In fact, English has had several great moments in history where the orthography could have been reformed. One of my favorites is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin's_phonetic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin's_phonetic_a...
marcosdumay 12y ago
English speaking people got luck in that phonology had almost no importance on the development of computing.

by jng 12y ago

sho_hn 12y ago

> and informative. There's a lot of half-knowledge and misdirection in this blog post, though. * Languages aren't writing systems, and vice-versa. * There are often decent reasons and upsides to the things he calls out as sucking. His rant on Hangul, for example - for human users, the morpho-syllabic grouping of letters into blocks in Korean writing tends to be beneficial, because they make the orthography of morphemes in different contexts more regular and morpheme reuse smoother. I also tend to consider the way Hangul is implemented in Unicode actually quite clever (you can use a formula to map from the code points of the individual letters to the code points of the pre-composed blocks). (I've contrasted Chinese and Hangul a little in this LWN comment: http://lwn.net/Articles/608260/ http://lwn.net/Articles/608260/) * The German ß isn't a simple ligature for 'ss'. It has a different history, an orthographic dimension and also serves as a useful prounciation hint. * Point 5, "The width of a character depends on context", is full of half-knowledge. First of, it's not "Jamo vowel" - 자모 (ja-mo) is the Korean word for "letter", so it's "vowel jamo" if anything. The alphabet is called 한글 (han-gul). Second, combining characters aren't in any way unique to Asian scripts in Unicode. Unicode contains separate code points for the individual Hangul letters and the blocks they can be combined into. Unicode also contains separate code points for Latin letters and the various diacritics and accents they combine with in Latin-derived Western scripts, along with code points for those combinations. For human users, these sort of consistent combinatorics in a script are a boon, and that Unicode chooses to represent both primitive elements and combined versions is a general trait of Unicode. In general, the thrust here is "your writing systems sucks for me while doing my job", which is subject to this guy's performance and qualifications. It's not the same as "writing system sucks for its users". I find the specter of stuff like this catching on as memes among linguistically and culturally ignorant hackers (because hey, we write English, so we're in the doing-it-right camp, right?) frightening, because programmer convenience is only one factor among many, and most likely not the most important one.

bane 12y ago
I think your points are correct. However, it really is difficult and requires lots of specialized domain knowledge to properly support a big group of the world's languages. I'd almost go so far as to hire a specialist developer just to do international character handling if that was a requirement of the software.
- sho_hn 12y ago
  It is difficult and does require some learning, yeah. In fact, it's more difficult than the article hints at, because while it falsely speaks of languages it's actually only concerned with writing systems, and a lot of the more interesting localization problems happen on the actual language/grammar level (for example, plain gettext isn't good enough to handle Korean post-positions, so we try to do better[1] in KDE). But we can and have built reusable tools to shoulder much of the burden, and because these problems are so fundamental and culture-enabling, it can actually be a really rewarding and satisfying area to work in. In fact, I bet if you catch the author on a better day, I wonder if he wouldn't agree. 1 = https://techbase.kde.org/Localization/Concepts/Transcript#Korean_Postpositions https://techbase.kde.org/Localization/Concepts/Transcript#Ko...
- Argorak 12y ago
  Yes. You probably should. But there is no point in ranting, the same is true if you want a good graphics system.
clairity 12y ago
i think the blocks-as-syllables concept in hangul makes lots of sense. that, and the straightforward mapping of letters to the english alphabet, made it fairly easy to learn how to read korean. understanding what you're reading is a completely different matter however.
- sho_hn 12y ago
  The funky part being that the blocks aren't just syllables, the boundaries between blocks often correspond to the boundaries between morphemes, because of how the phonotactics of the language have evolved and Hangul was designed to fit them. To use English as an example, the word "cats" contains two morphemes, the stem "cat" and the plural suffix "s". In Korean+Hangul, this sort of combination tends to split neatly into blocks, and when there are multiple options for how the letters can be distributed over them, the orthography usually prefers the variant that keeps the morpheme spelled consistently everywhere. This gives the writing a neat sort of lego blocks feel. There's plenty of other nifty traits to Hangul, such as the way many letters derive from each other graphically and thus lend themselves to two-step entry and reduced-number-of-keys inputs like keypads. And the design of the letters is featural, not arbitrary, that is they are often visualizations of tongue position or mouth shape when forming the respective sound. The theme here is: There are many other concerns when it comes to the quality of a writing system. What the author is concerned with here isn't entirely unimportant, but a very, very narrow view.

bane 12y ago

In fact, English has had several great moments in history where the orthography could have been reformed. One of my favorites is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin's_phonetic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin's_phonetic_a...

marcosdumay 12y ago

English speaking people got luck in that phonology had almost no importance on the development of computing.