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For the most part we're just talking alphabets here. Like, is it fair I have to be subjected to Greek letters whenever some author wants to impress folks? And then I go through mental gymnastics to transliterate the Greek letters to Latin, only to be rewarded with "theosdike," rendered in English as the mundane "theodicy." Y'know, like how many of these stupid dead Greeks are still around to care? Why can't we all just agree to use the Latin alphabet? And don't get me started on Cyrillic. I'd starve to death before I could transliterate all those backward letters and random substitutions. You could drive all around Moscow, passing by all the storefronts that say "PECTOPAH," never knowing that it was just another gawddamn "RESTORAN." "fuzzy end of this lolly-pop", my *ss. Sincerely, Cardinal Humbert, legate to Leo IX ----- Original Message ----- From: "tedd" <tedd@s...> To: <xml-dev@l...> Sent: Friday, 04 March, 2005 09:28 AM Subject: Re: [About Unicode] Why the symbol LOGICAL NOT is missing from the UCS ? William J. Kammerer said: >I can't comment on the usability of any alphabet other than Latin, but >is it "fair" that Chinese ideograms chew up tens of thousands of code >points in Unicode? All the while Latin only needs a few dozen even when >you throw in the accents and umlauts? Is it fair that we got first crack (the base) at the Unicode database? Is it fair that the rest of the world has to deal with all the ASCII characters that we English speaking countries have imposed on the Internet? Is it fair that we got all the "best" (keyboard wise) dot com names? Is it fair that we were so shortsighted that we used a seven-bit word instead of an eight-bit to resolve characters -- and now, as a result everyone must use nameprep and punnycode to translate all those tens of thousands of Chinese ideograms to ASCII for resolution? Keep in mind, that here are 260 TLDs. There are 7260 languages, some of them having 2 or even 3 scripts. There are around 13000 dialects of some importance (a language needs 100.000 people speaking it to survive). E-colonization (dominance of an e-culture) should probably lead to the initial deprecation of some languages, but recent history shows a cultural resistance and resurgence after such a shock. So one can consider that Internet will most probably help languages to survive and develop: a 50,000 people minim might be a good rule of thumb (think of trade, community idioms). So roughly one can consider that 50,000 languages with possible 260 variants (at TLD level) are to be considered. Obviously most of them will try to use the same script as much as they can for the TLDs. But this cannot be considered as systematic all throughout a language. So one has to consider 10 millions possibilities most of them synonyms or not implemented. I am just talking of the legacy: PADs may introduce 10 times this. Now, considering all of this, when we (Latin users) first started the Internet, we thought that seven bits could do it all -- what fairness in the world was that? No, I think the rest of the world got the fuzzy end of this lolly-pop. tedd
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