At 16:09 26-02-2001 -0800, David Starner wrote:
>Bah. Life requires compromise. There are many people working on
>Unicode, each with their own reasons. To stop working on Unicode
>because someone else finds something a cool idea that you don't is
>absurd, especially when that cool idea is going nowhere officially.
The Klingon thing is a symptom. I was very enthused about Unicode
when I first discovered it. Alas, it turned out to be just another
"internalization the English way": We'll be happy to speak any
language as long as it is English.
A group of Anglos has decided what is a character. They welcome
international input as long as it agrees with their own views.
If we look at it differently, we simply do not "understand".
>The Klingon script (for better or worse) is not encoded in Unicode, and
>there exists an active need (no matter how minor) for it to be encoded.
>The Slovak 'ch' is encoded in Unicode, and any proposal for it to be
>encoded is pointless.
This is exactly what I am talking about. But I have no intention
of restarting the "ch" debate, I just used it as an illustration.
It does not make sense to an Anglo that "ch" could be a character,
hence it is not. That it makes perfect sense to *us* is irrelevant.
Unicode is a good way for Anglophones to "deal" with other languages.
And to put pressure on other languages to do it the superior English
way.
Just recently someone said in this forum that Slovak is the same as
Czech. What's the point of even trying when foreign experts know our
languages better than we do?
Adam
P.S. This problem is not Unicode specific. The internationalization
of the C language, for example, is even worse. They have designed the
locale system that works fine for English and other languages with
virtually no grammar. It is impossible to design Slovak locale for
C without bastardizing our language. I know, I actually tried it.
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