7 ms·

I get the author's point, but assigning blame to the Unicode Consortium is incorrect. The Indian government dropped the ball here. They went their separate way

I get the author's point, but assigning blame to the Unicode Consortium is incorrect. The Indian government dropped the ball here. They went their separate way with "ISCII" and other such misguided efforts, instead of cooperating with UC. To me, the UC is just a platform. The government is the de facto safeguarder of the people's interests; if it drops the ball, it should be taken to task, not the provider of the platform.

shkkmo 12y ago
So blame the indian government for any problems with ISCII. The problems with Unicode support for global languages are indeed to be blamed on the Unicord Consortium. Nothing the indian governemnt did prevents the UC from availing themselves of the global knowledge needed to create a good global standard.
- mlmonkey 12y ago
  do you have any evidence that the UC has actively ignored requests from Bengali speakers? Has any Bengali speaker made proposals to the UC for fixing these issues? If yes, and the UC chose to ignore them, then there is some blame to be assigned with the UC. Otherwise, this is a non-issue. Take, for example, Tibetan. The number of Tibetan speakers is minuscule compared to, say, Bengali. But still Tibetan has good support, because enough people took an interest in getting it supported and worked with the UC to get it done.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - frivoal 12y ago
      Not true. Anybody with an email address can send feedback. And individuals who want to be more active and become an actual member have a $75 membership fee.
  - yuriks 12y ago
    I think it needs to be stressed that anyone can submit character proposals to the consortium and work with them to get them included in the next versions of the standard. You don't need to be a member (By paying the hefty fee. Someone needs to pay for the operational costs of the consortium.) to have your suggestions taken into account.
a_c_s 12y ago
This is a terrible excuse: the Unicode Consortium should always seek out at least one (if not a group of) native speakers of a language before defining code points for that language. These speakers really should be both native speakers of and experts in the language. There are countless ways to reach out to Bengali speakers, only one of which is the Indian government - whatever politics governments may play, a technocratic institution should be focused on getting things correct.
- mlmonkey 12y ago
  That's ridiculous. How can you expect UC to reach out to the 1000s of languages out there? Plus, shouldn't the party who expects to benefit put in the effort? Did you know that the Indian Government has a department for just such a thing, http://tdil.mit.gov.in/ http://tdil.mit.gov.in/ ? What has it been doing all these years? Added later: there's also CDAC http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual . And these are just 2 that I found quickly.
  - rpedroso 12y ago
    "The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards." The fact that it is their goal to set the standard for the textual representation of human speech means that they take on that responsibility.
    - mlmonkey 12y ago
      This is like complaining that Wikipedia has only 35K Bengali articles, while English has over 4.7M! <s>Why is Wikipedia not doing more to translate the 4.7M articles into Bengali? It does claim to be the world's encyclopedia!</s>
      - com2kid 12y ago
        Wikipedia is not forced unto the world as everyone's only source of knowledge. Unicode on the other hand is the only way many people have to input and see text in their native language. When one group proposes being the ultimate solution to everyone's problems, and then pushes their standard forward as such, complaints about inadequacies in the solution presented are perfectly fair and valid.
rpedroso 12y ago
There are over 100 languages spoken in India, many of which are not even Hindustani in origin. The Indian government primarily recognizes two languages: Hindi and Urdu. Additionally, Urdu is the official national language of Pakistan. Are speakers of Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, etc. really supposed to depend on the Indian government to assure that the Unicode Consortium supports their native tongues? What about speakers of Hindustani/Indo-Iranian languages who do not live in India? I don't think it's right to pin the blame on India and tell Bengali speakers that they're barking up the wrong tree. If the Unicode Consortium purports to set the standard for the encoding of human speech, then it seems to me that the responsibility should fall squarely on them.
- mlmonkey 12y ago
  The Indian government recognizes 22 languages, not 2. The government has a department dedicated to their support: http://tdil.mit.gov.in http://tdil.mit.gov.in Why isn't someone asking that department WTF has it been doing? Added later: and there's also CDAC http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual which has been at it since 1988.
  - rpedroso 12y ago
    I don't purport to know what the Technology Development for Indian Languages Departments is doing with its time, but perhaps its inefficacy is a signal that speakers of such languages should not need to depend on them for techno-linguistic representation.
afarrell 12y ago
But then consider the implementation path to fixing the problem for a minority linguistic group being deliberately repressed by their government--It would require blood. If there is some alternate process to work with the UC directly, that could be better but it puts the UC in the position of judging a linguistic group's claims for legitimacy. I agree that this refutes claims that the UC was negligent, but we can still say that they failed to be particularly assiduous in this case. Side question: does anyone know the story that led to http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13A0.pdf http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13A0.pdf ? EDIT: subjunctive
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  In specific or in general? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary An increasing corpus of children's literature is printed in Cherokee syllabary today to meet the needs of Cherokee students in the Cherokee language immersion schools in Oklahoma and North Carolina. In 2010, a Cherokee keyboard cover was developed by Roy Boney, Jr. and Joseph Erb, facilitating more rapid typing in Cherokee and now used by students in the Cherokee Nation Immersion School, where all coursework is written in syllabary.[8] The syllabary is finding increasingly diverse usage today, from books, newspapers, and websites to the street signs of Tahlequah, Oklahoma and Cherokee, North Carolina.
  - afarrell 12y ago
    In specific. I'm familiar with the rigin of the Cherokee Syllabary in general, though HN would probably find it enlightening.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  Unicode has excellent Tibetan support, despite that language and its script being notoriously difficult to work with. Also, Bengali is not just a major language in India, but the national language of an entire country (Bangladesh) with 100m+ people. It really is almost entirely the fault of the Bangladeshi and West Bengali authorities if they can't get their shit together enough to submit a decent proposal to Unicode.
anigbrowl 12y ago
The world (especially the technological) is changing too fast to rely on nation-state channels that proceed by forming commissions and writing position statements blah blah blah. It would be better for the Unicode consortium to start actively soliciting input and/or technical contributions from people.
vorg 12y ago
> The Indian government dropped the ball here. They went their separate way with "ISCII" and other such misguided efforts, instead of cooperating with UC According to the beginning of chapter 12 of the Unicode Standard 7.0: "The major official scripts of India proper [...] are all encoded according to a common plan, so that comparable characters are in the same order and relative location. This structural arrangement, which facilitates transliteration to some degree, is based on the Indian national standard (ISCII) encoding for these scripts. The first six columns in each script are isomorphic with the ISCII-1988 encoding, except that the last 11 positions, which are unassigned or undefined in ISCII-1988, are used in the Unicode encoding."

shkkmo 12y ago

So blame the indian government for any problems with ISCII. The problems with Unicode support for global languages are indeed to be blamed on the Unicord Consortium. Nothing the indian governemnt did prevents the UC from availing themselves of the global knowledge needed to create a good global standard.

mlmonkey 12y ago
do you have any evidence that the UC has actively ignored requests from Bengali speakers? Has any Bengali speaker made proposals to the UC for fixing these issues? If yes, and the UC chose to ignore them, then there is some blame to be assigned with the UC. Otherwise, this is a non-issue. Take, for example, Tibetan. The number of Tibetan speakers is minuscule compared to, say, Bengali. But still Tibetan has good support, because enough people took an interest in getting it supported and worked with the UC to get it done.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - frivoal 12y ago
    Not true. Anybody with an email address can send feedback. And individuals who want to be more active and become an actual member have a $75 membership fee.
- yuriks 12y ago
  I think it needs to be stressed that anyone can submit character proposals to the consortium and work with them to get them included in the next versions of the standard. You don't need to be a member (By paying the hefty fee. Someone needs to pay for the operational costs of the consortium.) to have your suggestions taken into account.

a_c_s 12y ago

This is a terrible excuse: the Unicode Consortium should always seek out at least one (if not a group of) native speakers of a language before defining code points for that language. These speakers really should be both native speakers of and experts in the language. There are countless ways to reach out to Bengali speakers, only one of which is the Indian government - whatever politics governments may play, a technocratic institution should be focused on getting things correct.

mlmonkey 12y ago
That's ridiculous. How can you expect UC to reach out to the 1000s of languages out there? Plus, shouldn't the party who expects to benefit put in the effort? Did you know that the Indian Government has a department for just such a thing, http://tdil.mit.gov.in/ http://tdil.mit.gov.in/ ? What has it been doing all these years? Added later: there's also CDAC http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual . And these are just 2 that I found quickly.
- rpedroso 12y ago
  "The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards." The fact that it is their goal to set the standard for the textual representation of human speech means that they take on that responsibility.
  - mlmonkey 12y ago
    This is like complaining that Wikipedia has only 35K Bengali articles, while English has over 4.7M! <s>Why is Wikipedia not doing more to translate the 4.7M articles into Bengali? It does claim to be the world's encyclopedia!</s>
    - com2kid 12y ago
      Wikipedia is not forced unto the world as everyone's only source of knowledge. Unicode on the other hand is the only way many people have to input and see text in their native language. When one group proposes being the ultimate solution to everyone's problems, and then pushes their standard forward as such, complaints about inadequacies in the solution presented are perfectly fair and valid.

rpedroso 12y ago

There are over 100 languages spoken in India, many of which are not even Hindustani in origin. The Indian government primarily recognizes two languages: Hindi and Urdu. Additionally, Urdu is the official national language of Pakistan. Are speakers of Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, etc. really supposed to depend on the Indian government to assure that the Unicode Consortium supports their native tongues? What about speakers of Hindustani/Indo-Iranian languages who do not live in India? I don't think it's right to pin the blame on India and tell Bengali speakers that they're barking up the wrong tree. If the Unicode Consortium purports to set the standard for the encoding of human speech, then it seems to me that the responsibility should fall squarely on them.

mlmonkey 12y ago
The Indian government recognizes 22 languages, not 2. The government has a department dedicated to their support: http://tdil.mit.gov.in http://tdil.mit.gov.in Why isn't someone asking that department WTF has it been doing? Added later: and there's also CDAC http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual which has been at it since 1988.
- rpedroso 12y ago
  I don't purport to know what the Technology Development for Indian Languages Departments is doing with its time, but perhaps its inefficacy is a signal that speakers of such languages should not need to depend on them for techno-linguistic representation.

afarrell 12y ago

But then consider the implementation path to fixing the problem for a minority linguistic group being deliberately repressed by their government--It would require blood. If there is some alternate process to work with the UC directly, that could be better but it puts the UC in the position of judging a linguistic group's claims for legitimacy. I agree that this refutes claims that the UC was negligent, but we can still say that they failed to be particularly assiduous in this case. Side question: does anyone know the story that led to http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13A0.pdf http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13A0.pdf ? EDIT: subjunctive

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
In specific or in general? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary An increasing corpus of children's literature is printed in Cherokee syllabary today to meet the needs of Cherokee students in the Cherokee language immersion schools in Oklahoma and North Carolina. In 2010, a Cherokee keyboard cover was developed by Roy Boney, Jr. and Joseph Erb, facilitating more rapid typing in Cherokee and now used by students in the Cherokee Nation Immersion School, where all coursework is written in syllabary.[8] The syllabary is finding increasingly diverse usage today, from books, newspapers, and websites to the street signs of Tahlequah, Oklahoma and Cherokee, North Carolina.
- afarrell 12y ago
  In specific. I'm familiar with the rigin of the Cherokee Syllabary in general, though HN would probably find it enlightening.
jpatokal 12y ago
Unicode has excellent Tibetan support, despite that language and its script being notoriously difficult to work with. Also, Bengali is not just a major language in India, but the national language of an entire country (Bangladesh) with 100m+ people. It really is almost entirely the fault of the Bangladeshi and West Bengali authorities if they can't get their shit together enough to submit a decent proposal to Unicode.

anigbrowl 12y ago

The world (especially the technological) is changing too fast to rely on nation-state channels that proceed by forming commissions and writing position statements blah blah blah. It would be better for the Unicode consortium to start actively soliciting input and/or technical contributions from people.

vorg 12y ago

> The Indian government dropped the ball here. They went their separate way with "ISCII" and other such misguided efforts, instead of cooperating with UC According to the beginning of chapter 12 of the Unicode Standard 7.0: "The major official scripts of India proper [...] are all encoded according to a common plan, so that comparable characters are in the same order and relative location. This structural arrangement, which facilitates transliteration to some degree, is based on the Indian national standard (ISCII) encoding for these scripts. The first six columns in each script are isomorphic with the ISCII-1988 encoding, except that the last 11 positions, which are unassigned or undefined in ISCII-1988, are used in the Unicode encoding."