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> Is Bengali your first language? Yes. > [...] it's rather confusing mental acrobatics, and it doesn't reflect either how the writing system is taught, or how

by sdg1 12y ago

> Is Bengali your first language? Yes. > [...] it's rather confusing mental acrobatics, and it doesn't reflect either how the writing system is taught, or how native speakers use it and think of it on a day-to-day basis. Mental acrobatics are part-and-parcel of the language, either in digital or non-digital form. If I were to spell out your name aloud, I would end with "ত-এ য-ফলা", which doesn't really say anything about how ত্য is pronounced. While writing on paper, we say "ক-এ ইকার", and then we reorder what we just said to write the ইকার in front of the ক. Even more complicated mental acrobatics - we say ক-এ ওকার, and then proceed to write half of the ওকার in front of the ক and then the other half, after the ক. We don't necessarily think about these when we carry out these acrobatics in our head, but they exist, and we have made the layer on top of the encoding system (rendering, and to some extent, input) deal with these acrobatics as well. My point in the original comment (and to some extent in the preceding one) was to emphasize that a lot of these issues are at the input method level - we should not have to think about encoding as long as it accurately and unambiguously represent whatever we want it to represent. Just out of curiosity - I would be interested to know more about your learning experience that you feel is not well aligned with the representation of jophola as it is currently.

chimeracoder 12y ago
> My point in the original comment (and to some extent in the preceding one) was to emphasize that a lot of these issues are at the input method level - we should not have to think about encoding as long as it accurately and unambiguously represent whatever we want it to represent. I might be sympathetic to this, except that keyboard layouts and input (esp. on mobile devices) is an even bigger mess and even more fragmented than character encoding. Furthermore, while keys are not a 1:1 mapping with Unicode codepoints, they are very strongly influenced by the defined codepoints. It'd be nice to separate those two components cleanly, but since language is defined by how it's used, this abstraction is always going to be very porous. > Just out of curiosity - I would be interested to know more about your learning experience that you feel is not well aligned with the representation of jophola as it is currently. I have literally never once heard the jophola referred to as a viram and a য, except in contexts such as this one. Especially since the jophola creates a vowel sound (instead of the consonant য), and especially since the jophola isn't even pronounced like "y". (I understand why the jophola is pronounced the way it does, but arguing on the basis of phonetic Sanskrit is a poor representation of Bengali today - by that point, we might as well be arguing that the thorn[0] is equivalent to "th" today, or that æ should be a separate letter and not a dipthong[1]) I'm not going to claim that it's completely without pre-digital precedent, but it certainly is not universal, and it's inconsistent in one of the above ways no matter how one slices it, especially when looking at some incredibly obscure and/or antiquated modifiers that are given their own characters, despite being undeniably joined of other characters that are already Unicode codepoints[2]. (Out of curiosity, where in Bengal are you from?) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29 [1] As it was in Old English. [2] Such as the ash (æ)!
- plesner 12y ago
  Not necessarily disagreeing with your broader point but I just want to point out that the examples are only obscure and antiquared in English. æ is common in modern Danish and unambiguously a separate letter, as is þ in Icelandic.
  - e12e 12y ago
    And Norwegian (for æ). We have æ/Æ and ø/Ø (distinct, in theory, from the symbol for the empty set, btw), while å/Å used to be written aa/AA a long time ago (but is obviously not a result of combining two a's). Swedish uses ö/Ö for essentially ø/Ø, ä/Ä for æ/Æ. And both of those I can only easily type by combining the dot-dot, with o/O, a/A because my Norwegian keyboard layout has key for/labelled øæå, not öäå. For Japanese (and Chinese and a few others) things are even more complicated. It's tricky to fit ~5000 symbols on a keyboard, so typically in Japan one types on either a phonetic layout, or a latin layout, and translate to Kanji as needed (eg: "nihongo" or "にほんご" is transformed to "日本語" -- note also that "ご" itself is a compound character, "ko" modified by two dots to become "go" -- which may or may not be entered as a compound, with a modifier key). As I currently don't have any Japanese input installed under xorg, that last bit I had to cut and paste. It is entirely valid to view ø as a combination of o and a (short) slash, or å as a combination of "a" and "°" -- but if one does that while typing, it is important that software handles the compound correctly (and distinct from ligatures, as mentioned above). My brother's name, "Ståle" is five letters/symbols long, if reversed it becomes "elåtS", not "el°atS" (six symbols). So, yeah, it's complicated. Remember that we've spent many years fighting the hack that was ascii, extended ascii (which may be (part of) why eg: Norwegian gets to have å rather than a+°). You still can't easily use utf8 with neither C nor, as I understand it C++ (almost, but not quite -- AFAIK one easy workaround is to use QT's strings if one can have qt as a dependency -- and it's still a mess on Windows, due to their botched wide char hacks... etc). All in all, while it's nice to think that one can take some modernized, English-centric ideas evolved from the Gutenberg press, and mash it together with what constitutes a "letter" (How hard is it to reverse a string!? How hard is it to count letters!? How hard is it to count words?!) -- that approach is simply wrong. There will always be magic, and there'll be very few things that can be said with confidence to be valid across all locales. What is to_upper("日本語"), reverse("Ståle"), character_count("Ståle"), word_count("日本語") etc. This turned into a bit more of an essay than I intended, sorry about that :-)

by sdg1 12y ago

chimeracoder 12y ago

> My point in the original comment (and to some extent in the preceding one) was to emphasize that a lot of these issues are at the input method level - we should not have to think about encoding as long as it accurately and unambiguously represent whatever we want it to represent. I might be sympathetic to this, except that keyboard layouts and input (esp. on mobile devices) is an even bigger mess and even more fragmented than character encoding. Furthermore, while keys are not a 1:1 mapping with Unicode codepoints, they are very strongly influenced by the defined codepoints. It'd be nice to separate those two components cleanly, but since language is defined by how it's used, this abstraction is always going to be very porous. > Just out of curiosity - I would be interested to know more about your learning experience that you feel is not well aligned with the representation of jophola as it is currently. I have literally never once heard the jophola referred to as a viram and a য, except in contexts such as this one. Especially since the jophola creates a vowel sound (instead of the consonant য), and especially since the jophola isn't even pronounced like "y". (I understand why the jophola is pronounced the way it does, but arguing on the basis of phonetic Sanskrit is a poor representation of Bengali today - by that point, we might as well be arguing that the thorn[0] is equivalent to "th" today, or that æ should be a separate letter and not a dipthong[1]) I'm not going to claim that it's completely without pre-digital precedent, but it certainly is not universal, and it's inconsistent in one of the above ways no matter how one slices it, especially when looking at some incredibly obscure and/or antiquated modifiers that are given their own characters, despite being undeniably joined of other characters that are already Unicode codepoints[2]. (Out of curiosity, where in Bengal are you from?) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29 [1] As it was in Old English. [2] Such as the ash (æ)!

plesner 12y ago
Not necessarily disagreeing with your broader point but I just want to point out that the examples are only obscure and antiquared in English. æ is common in modern Danish and unambiguously a separate letter, as is þ in Icelandic.
- e12e 12y ago
  And Norwegian (for æ). We have æ/Æ and ø/Ø (distinct, in theory, from the symbol for the empty set, btw), while å/Å used to be written aa/AA a long time ago (but is obviously not a result of combining two a's). Swedish uses ö/Ö for essentially ø/Ø, ä/Ä for æ/Æ. And both of those I can only easily type by combining the dot-dot, with o/O, a/A because my Norwegian keyboard layout has key for/labelled øæå, not öäå. For Japanese (and Chinese and a few others) things are even more complicated. It's tricky to fit ~5000 symbols on a keyboard, so typically in Japan one types on either a phonetic layout, or a latin layout, and translate to Kanji as needed (eg: "nihongo" or "にほんご" is transformed to "日本語" -- note also that "ご" itself is a compound character, "ko" modified by two dots to become "go" -- which may or may not be entered as a compound, with a modifier key). As I currently don't have any Japanese input installed under xorg, that last bit I had to cut and paste. It is entirely valid to view ø as a combination of o and a (short) slash, or å as a combination of "a" and "°" -- but if one does that while typing, it is important that software handles the compound correctly (and distinct from ligatures, as mentioned above). My brother's name, "Ståle" is five letters/symbols long, if reversed it becomes "elåtS", not "el°atS" (six symbols). So, yeah, it's complicated. Remember that we've spent many years fighting the hack that was ascii, extended ascii (which may be (part of) why eg: Norwegian gets to have å rather than a+°). You still can't easily use utf8 with neither C nor, as I understand it C++ (almost, but not quite -- AFAIK one easy workaround is to use QT's strings if one can have qt as a dependency -- and it's still a mess on Windows, due to their botched wide char hacks... etc). All in all, while it's nice to think that one can take some modernized, English-centric ideas evolved from the Gutenberg press, and mash it together with what constitutes a "letter" (How hard is it to reverse a string!? How hard is it to count letters!? How hard is it to count words?!) -- that approach is simply wrong. There will always be magic, and there'll be very few things that can be said with confidence to be valid across all locales. What is to_upper("日本語"), reverse("Ståle"), character_count("Ståle"), word_count("日本語") etc. This turned into a bit more of an essay than I intended, sorry about that :-)