From: Neil Harris (neil@tonal.clara.co.uk)
Date: Fri Jan 28 2011 - 05:03:50 CST
On 28/01/11 10:10, William_J_G Overington wrote:
> On Thursday 27 January 2011, Doug Ewell<doug@ewellic.org> wrote:
>
>> I do not believe localizable sentences will ever be appropriate for standardization in a plain-text character encoding, regardless of the size of the community of users. Perhaps they would be appropriate for standardization somewhere, but not in a character encoding.
>
> If localizable sentences become encoded in Unicode plain-text character encoding then they could be used intermixed with ordinary language.
>
> Suppose please that the following localizable sentence were encoded using one codepoint of plane 7.
>
> U+7XXXX Where can I buy a meal without any gluten in it please?
>
> For example, please consider that an English-speaking person in an Italian town wants to ask "Where can I buy a meal without any gluten in it please?" then he or she could use the U+7XXXX codepoint and throw it from an iPad to an iPad of an Italian-speaking person who could reply with the name of a restaurant and its address.
>
> If localizable sentences for giving movement directions were also encoded in Unicode then the Italian-speaking person could throw back directions that he or she had composed from an iPad menu in Italian and those directions would be displayed in English on the receiving iPad.
>
> William Overington
>
> 28 January 2011
>
>
William,
I can trivially enumerate tens of millions of such simple sentences, and
there are substantially less than a million free code points left.
Since it would seem rather inconvenient to have no way to encode new
characters into Unicode once the code point space has been filled with
sentences, could you perhaps create a list of the sentences you believe
most important to encode, and a rationale as to why these particular
sentences, and not others, are worth encoding?
Also, given that memory is cheap now, would it not be a simpler way to
achieve your goal just be to create a list of such sentences in
English,together with a list of their translations in each language, and
distribute it widely? A file containing a million such sentences, each
translated into a hundred languages, would compress to a file size of
roughly a hundred megabytes, which could trivially be stored on any
modern hand-held device, and would eliminate any need to make encoding
decisions: you would simply send the English-language version as a key.
-- Neil
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