I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by bbreier on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @01:58PM (#9219881)

The author's explanation of what characters Chinese, Japanese, and Korean share is very limited. All three languages use Chinese characters in written language to varying extents, and in some cases the differences begin significantly less than a century ago. Though there are cases where the same Chinese character represented in Japanese writing is different from how it is represented in Traditional Chinese writing (i.e. 国, Japanese version only because I don't have Chinese installed on this PC), which could be different still from how it is represented in Simplified Chinese, there are also many instances where the character is identical across all three languages (i.e. 中). Although I am not privy to the specifics of the CJK unification project, identifying these cases and using the same character for them doesn't sound unreasonable.

Edit- To be clear, Korean primarily uses Hangul, which basically derives jack and shit from the Chinese alphabet, and Japanese uses a mixture of the Chinese alphabet, and two alphabets that sort-of kind-of owe some of their heritage to the Chinese alphabet, but look nothing like it. If they are talking about unifying these alphabets, then they are out of their minds.

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by yummyfajitas on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:10PM (#9219990)

Nor is it unreasonable to "unify" Latin, Greek and Cyrilic:

Cyrillic ПФ vs Greek ΠΦ

Cyrillic АВ vs Latin AB

Obviously using ω for w (as he does) is stupid, but his reducto-ad-absurdum is not particularly absurd.

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by peterfirefly on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @03:07PM (#9220443)

Not unifying them means that the fonts automatically work when you mix text/names written in these alphabets. It also means that mathematical/physical/chemical stuff (that typically uses Latin and Greek letters together) will just work. There is a similar reasoning behind all the mathematical alphabets in Unicode.

Furthermore, Unicode was supposed to handle transcoding from all important preexisting encodings to Unicode and back with no or minimal loss. Since ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic) and 8859-7 (Greek) already existed (and both included ASCII, hence all the basic Latin letters), the ship had definitively sailed on LaGreCy unification.

On top of that, CJK unification affected so many characters that the savings would really matter and it happened at a time where the codepoints were only 16 bit so it helped squeeze the whole in. All continental European languages suffered equally or worse back when all their letters had to be squeezed into 8 bits /and/ coexist with ASCII.

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by masklinn on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @04:02PM (#9220946)

> Not unifying them means that the fonts automatically work when you mix text/names written in these alphabets. It also means that mathematical/physical/chemical stuff (that typically uses Latin and Greek letters together) will just work.

These are already completely separate symbols. Ignoring precomposition, there are at least 4 different lowercase omegas in unicode: APL (⍵ U+2375 "APL FUNCTIONAL SYMBOL OMEGA"), cyrillic (ѡ U+0461 "CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER OMEGA"), greek (ω U+03C9 "GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA") and Mathematics (𝜔 U+1D714 "MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL OMEGA").

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by jeorgun on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:48PM (#9220305)

Unicode kind of does this already with dotless 'i'; capital 'ı' and lowercase 'İ' are represented as regular latin 'I' and 'i' respectively, despite being semantically different letters.

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by riffraff on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @03:57PM (#9220894)

hungarian "a" is also a separate letter from hungarian "á" but shares the same glyph with english "a" (edit: all vowels are actually considered different letters in their accented form in hungarian, while obviously they are the same letter with a modifier in some latin languages).

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by saalweachter on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:29PM (#9220163)

(For those who are rusty on their Greek, ω is a lower-case omega, and unrelated to the English/German letter w.)

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by iopq on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @09:42PM (#9223048)

Cyrillic ПФ vs Greek ΠΦ?

Here's Cyrillic lower case: пф Here's Greek lower case: πφ

in some fonts the pi would be rendered with a longer bar on top, but you just showed why it's a bad idea:

I would want to be able to discuss Greek in Russian on a forum, but this would not be possible because all the glyphs in lowercase would look Russian

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by claudius on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @08:38AM (#9224964)

The forms 𝜙 and 𝜑 of "lowercase phi" to have different codepoints makes perfect sense to me. That doesn’t mean that upper-case variants of these can’t share a codepoint. As presented elsewhere in this thread, "X.toUpper().toLower()" doesn’t have to be "X". The same holds for "B → b" and "B → β" depending on the context. It’s just that the savings from such a unification would be far smaller due to the smaller sizes of the relevant alphabets.

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by iopq on Saturday March 21, 2015 @07:16AM (#9242425)

OK, but you still have a problem because I want to use the same font for Greek and Russian. What if my font is CURSIVE?

Russian and Greek have different cursive forms. You might unify κ and к, but actually the cursive form of κ looks like a Roman u.

So really if this were to happen you'd have "Russian" fonts and "Greek" fonts. Kind of like how Japanese and Chinese have to use different fonts for their languages.

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by microcolonel on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:27PM (#9220143)

I think their distinct calligraphic representations mean that these would be destructive; whereas with regard to CJK, the characters are clearly represented the same way between the considered languages.

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by EdiX on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @03:11PM (#9220472)

> If they are talking about unifying these alphabets, then they are out of their minds.

AFAIK the author is just discussing han unification:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by chris_wot on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @09:54AM (#9225438)

According to Wikipedia, this is being coordinated by the Ideographic Rapporteur Group, and "the working members of the IRG are either appointed by member governments, or are invited experts from other countries. IRG members include Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taipei Computer Association, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Vietnam and United States."

So this criticism of English speakers seems pretty unfounded! And his concerns about unification is being driven by a diverse group of experts in a variety of countries - so not sure why the concern?

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by kijin on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @08:48PM (#9222791)

Exactly. The Han Unificiation project never tried to unify everything. They just took the set of common characters and unified them, leaving the rest alone. They may have made some mistakes in choosing which characters to unify, but for the most part they did a splendid job.

Korean (Hangul) has its own, massive block of over 11K code points. Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, and other assorted symbols) also has its own block outside of the Unified Han block. Chinese characters that are clearly distinct get their own code points as well. How else would I write 国 and 國 in the same sentence?

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by legulere on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:43PM (#9220271)

Also Antiqua and Fraktur used to be seen as different writing systems (ſ, I and J being equivalent, tironian et being some examples where they differ), yet this is largely ignored by Unicode (except when used in mathematics)

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by nothrabannosir on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:17PM (#9220055)

tangent, but isn't 国 simplified and 國 traditional guó?

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Re:I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode by bbreier on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:26PM (#9220129)

Yes, that's exactly right. In this case, Japanese uses the simplified version, but in others it uses the traditional version (or even a version that is slightly different from the current traditional version used in Taiwan or Cantonese.)

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