6 ms·
Two Dots Too Many (2008)
- dmitrig01 11y agoAutocorrect kills
- currysausage 11y ago> Killing people kills FTFY.
- thaumasiotes 11y agoIn this case (as reported), the message was correct, but the recipient's phone wasn't capable of displaying Turkish letters.
- pluma 11y agoAtatürk gave Turkey a lot of great things. The alphabet isn't one of them. The dotted/dotless "i" in Turkish is just plain broken and there's no way to support it without 100% confidence in the text's language (which is impossible in the real world because multi-language users are a thing). For anyone not familiar with the problem, the two variants of the letter "i" in Turkish are considered two separate letters but neither the dotless nor the dotted "i" is compatible with the non-Turkish "i" in lower and upper case: * the lower case of upper case "I" is the dotless "ı" (not "i" as everywhere else) * the upper case of lower case "i" is the dotted "İ" (not "I" as everywhere else) This is basically a bug in the original specification (ca. 19th century) that was never fixed and now causes all kinds of problems for anyone trying to support it (because languages no longer live in isolation).
- rspeer 11y agoI mean, to be fair, Atatürk had no way to know that over a century later, people would be using things called computers to perform such strange operations as converting between lowercase and uppercase text.
- pygy_ 11y agoDefinitely not a bug in the alphabet. It's a bit of a shame that Unicode doesn't cover the issue automatically, though. It could have custom code points for the pairs that convert case correctly without having to write special cases for handling the Turkish language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rspeer 11y agoYeah, the part of the Unicode standard that talks about case-mapping and how you might want to do it differently in Turkish has a strong undertone of "of course you aren't really going to do this". There's almost a solution you could hack in if you could convince people and input methods to stop using plain-ASCII "i" and "I" in Turkish (which is quite a hurdle). You can stick a combining dot on the "i", which doesn't change its appearance, but now it uppercases correctly. But there's no "combining lack of dot" you can put on "I" to make it lowercase correctly.
- pluma 11y agoThe obvious parallel are modifiers in other language. For example, umlauts in German can be considered as the regular letters A, O and U with diacritics[0]. In the same way, if the Turkish dotless upper case I was encoded as a separate letter from Capital Latin Letter I, Turkish ı could receive a "dot above" modifier to become i and Turkish I could receive the same modifier to become İ. [0]: I'm German, so I'm aware that it's a bit more complex than that, but although we have separate "letters" for Ä, Ö and Ü, they're really just AE, OE and UE ligatures, respectively. You could argue that they're not because replacing them with the non-ligature version changes meaning but thanks to modern technology (and historical domain name restrictions) most Germans can deal with that kind of ambiguity just fine. Besides, the diaeresis in German umlauts is actually a vestigial lower case "e" (as can be seen in old manuscripts).
- provemewrong 11y ago>* the lower case of upper case "I" is the dotless "ı" (not "i" as everywhere else) >* the upper case of lower case "i" is the dotted "İ" (not "I" as everywhere else) It does make sense though.
- pluma 11y agoSure, but only if you can convince every other alphabet to either replace their lower case "i" with the dotless "ı" or their upper case "I" with the dotted "İ".
- lmnt 11y agoActually, it's asymmetric in that the upper case of lower case "j" is the dotless "J".
- raldi 11y agoDoes it, though? Would you also say it would make more sense for the lowercase B to have two enclosed spaces instead of just one?
- thaumasiotes 11y agoWould it make more sense to have just one glyph for a letter instead of two? Of course. We're not getting anything out of making the distinction.
- learnstats2 11y ago>The dotted/dotless "i" in Turkish is just plain broken A Turkish person looking at the English alphabet can make exactly the same argument in the other direction - plus, why does English only have five graphemes for vowels?
- pluma 11y agoIn principle I would agree, but the Atatürk alphabet was made up at the spot based on the existing Latin alphabets.
- ggreer 11y agoArguing in the other direction isn't as persuasive, because Turkish and English aren't the only two languages in existence. French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, German, and many others use the same letter i and have more vowel sounds than vowel characters. That's nobody's fault in particular, though. Unlike Turkish, these languages did not have their writing systems dictated from on high.
- learnstats2 11y agoFor example, Dutch has the letter IJ.
- pluma 11y ago... which actually has a ligature of its own, making it more similar to German umlauts (give or take a few hundred years of degrading handwriting shorthands).
- mrec 11y agoThat sounds awfully like reinventing grue/bleen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction
- codeflo 11y agoLanguage is what it is, and the "specification" was invented long before anyone needed precise algorithmic rules. IMHO, the real WTF is that Unicode decided to reuse the ASCII codepoints for "i" and "I" to encode the Turkish alphabet. If you think about it, it doesn't make sense to use "LATIN SMALL LETTER I" as the lowercase form of "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE". Four new codepoints for Turkish ı/I and i/İ would have solved so many problems.
- genericuser 11y agoExactly. These are two completely different letters that exist in Turkish, neither of them should be represented by a letter in English which does not exist in Turkish.
- thaumasiotes 11y agoSo... the Unicode standard was right to have separate codepoints for "greek capital letter omega" and "ohm symbol", and wrong to share the same point between "latin small letter s" and "seconds symbol"?
- genericuser 11y agoI would argue that it was because, because there is no such thing, to my knowledge, as capital and lowercase seconds. In this way the only dangers from accidental capitalization would be capitonyms* and possibly someone thinking you were shouting depending on the level of your capital letter abuse. <sarcasm> In the latter case I think we can all agree they deserve to be stabbed, right? </sarcasm> *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitonym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitonym
- thaumasiotes 11y agoBut Unicode isn't in the business of cataloguing all the possible meanings in the world. They're a catalog of glyphs. Looking into it further, I see that indeed "Cyrillic Capital Letter A", "Greek Capital Letter Alpha", and "Latin Capital Letter A" are different, despite not actually being different in any way. That supports the idea that "Latin small letter i" and "Turkish small letter i with dot" should be different points. But it also supports the idea that "Latin Capital Letter A", "English Capital Letter A", and "French Capital Letter A" should all be different points, which they're not. This approach is incoherent. In Chinese writing, the same syllable shì is encoded differently depending on whether it means "be", "circumstance", "the world", "city", "style", "respectable person", "Shì, the surname", "room", "test", "look at", "indicate", "suitable", "knowledge", etc. And those examples I've listed are just the shì's that I personally know -- there are plenty more. This was, by any standard at all, a terrible, terrible decision (to be fair, Japanese writing is even worse). Why would you want Unicode to be more like that?
- serve_yay 11y agoOK. But there are many, many aspects of our own language which don't really make sense. And that would go for pretty much all of them except I guess Esperanto.
- roel_v 11y agoSolid advise in this article: "Another is that it is best not to kill people who make you angry until you have carefully investigated the situation, if then."
- antihero 11y agoHonestly though, what killed these people was a stupidity - surely if someone says something this nasty where there's an obvious ambiguity in the language, stabbing them over it without asking first is just ridiculous behaviour.
- themartorana 11y agoYeah, blaming this one on a weird character in text is a stretch. I'm not sure "honor killings" rank on the list of why double-checking localized fonts on devices is important. The article does acknowledge you shouldn't kill someone until you investigate a possible misunderstanding...
- harperlee 11y agoCompletely agree. My language (spanish) has also accents (tildes) and tildes (virgulilla) and two dots (diéreses). But when texting, people don't always write them, so when an ambiguity arises you notice. They were also clearly having a fight through the phone, so even more reason for not having a completely correct text composed. More to the point, they ended up dead because they were already quite upset and were sufficiently violent people to reach that point, so also not localization's fault!
- serve_yay 11y agoSure. And the bug should also be fixed. Pretty much everyone here is changing the subject, so to speak, which I find telling in itself.
- Retra 11y agoTelling of what, exactly?
- chasing 11y ago> The Turkish newspaper Hürriyet reports a tragic consequence of the failure to localize cell phones. Which assumes that murder is an appropriate response when someone calls someone else a whore...
- serve_yay 11y agoWow, what a disaster.