From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Apr 13 2005 - 10:07:43 CST
On 13/04/2005 02:25, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> ...
> Instead of focusing too much about the proper name of characters used
> in various languages or cultures, why not instead initiating a
> localization project within the CLDR, to create localized character
> names for each language?
Good idea! Let's localise all the character names into proper English,
and redefine the existing list as in gobbledygook language, or
Unicodese, or something else which is explicitly not English. After all,
BRAKCET is not an English word.
>
> ...(the default locale should use the normative Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646
> names, not necessarily the English-US locale)
But this defeats the whole purpose. NOTHING should use the normative
Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646 names, because these are garbage.
Ken Whistler wrote:
>But wait! Reasonable people will say, "It's a standard. Of course
>the name should be correct. And if it isn't correct, it should
>be corrected, so the standard is correct."
>
>I trust that is a fair summary of the position that E. Trager,
>P. Kirk, S. Srivas, and others have been maintaining recently
>on this topic.
>
>
>
It is not my position that these names should be corrected, because I
know that they cannot be. My position is that these garbage names should
not be used, and that an alternative set be used instead. The difference
may be small, but I am explicitly accepting the Unicode stability
policy, and trying to find a way to work around it. So please don't
associate my position with that of Sinnathurai Srivas who rejects the
Unicode stability policy, although I share his concerns that ISO seems
to demonstrate a lack of respect for languages and people.
Adam Twardoch wrote:
> Unicode names are arbitrary, just like the glyphs depicted in the
> Unicode Standard.
Indeed. The problem is that they appear to be partly meaningful strings
of English words when they are not, when in fact some of them are
meaningless, and some of them have a misleading meaning. It would have
been better to assign to each character as a "name" a series of random
characters, or else just the identifier in the form U+xxxx. And it would
have been better not to call them "names" but "identifiers".
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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