OT: Unicode Unification Objections

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

When subject matter experts from important language and cultural groups
suggest that a unification in Unicode is objectionable, I think one
should listen more carefully, even if it involves something that is hard
to make sense of from within *our* cultural and language illusion.

Consider the following.  In Japanese texts, when a borrowed or employed
Korean word is used, a desired practice is to render the Korean
characters as different, even though some or all of them involve "the
same character" common to both languages.  However, the iconography (or
calligraphy) is commonly different.  This loses the ability to
distinguish the linguistic use of the character, forcing material to be
font-distinguished some how (e.g., give me the ones that look Korean,
not the ones that look Japanese).  This means that the distinction can't
be preserved in simple text.  One might regard this as a desire to honor
the linguistic origins and usages of a word or phrase.

Here are more cases.  There are some characters which are arguably the
same in the Greek and Roman (and Cyrillic) alphabets.  These were *not*
"unified."  It is certainly helpful that they were not.  (Especially
since I rely heavily but not exclusively on one of those alphabets in
*my* culture.)  It is also helpful that the Western desire to
differentiate "A" from "a" was fortunately preserved (thanks to ISO 646
getting there first, I suppose).  They *are* the same letter, aren't
they?

Unfortunately, the Greek alphabet and the APL alphabet (and apparently
some other math symbol alphabets) *were* unified.  That is, a number of
Greek-letter symbols were removed from any distinct APL character set,
and only some APL-unique made-up symbols having Greek letters in them
were retained as separate.  Unfortunately, the iconography of the Greek
alphabet in Greek text is often enough different that those codes don't
render appropriately with the other APL symbols when used in APL texts.
Borrowing epsilon (for member) from the Greek character set in Unicode
is not always what one wants to do when writing membership propositions
in APL (and borrowing the alternative MEMBER OF symbol may not get you
what you want either).  It's even more fun if you want to write APL
programs and use Greek-language identifiers.  Something a CP4E teacher
in a Greek school might strongly desire to do.  Get it?

I'm told that Ken Iverson is working on a new language beyond APL, and
that it relies much less on special symbols in its reference notation.
I wonder if that provides relief or simply puts the new language on the
same multinationalization footing as the rest.

Meanwhile, I suggest that if one wants to find "racial illusions," (a
self-describing term, perhaps?), one can easily do so aplenty in the
Unicode standard as it is already written.

-- Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: python-list-admin at python.org
[mailto:python-list-admin at python.org]On Behalf Of Mark Atwood
Sent: Sunday, 23 April 2000 20:21
To: python-list at python.org
Subject: Re: Python - Next Release Questions


"Dennis E. Hamilton" <infonuovo at email.com> writes:
> issues and locale issues to deal with.  There are also language
communities
> that have difficulty with Unicode for cultural as well as application
> reasons.

I.E., the various cultural groups that dislike the Unicode Han
unification because they wish to continue their racial illusion that
C, J, & V characters are completely different and seperate sets, and
that it's somehow corrupting to stir them together.

--
Mark Atwood   | It is the hardest thing for intellectuals to understand,
that
mra at pobox.com | just because they haven't thought of something, somebody
else
              | might. <http://www.friesian.com/rifkin.htm>
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
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