From: avg@rodan.UU.NET (Vadim Antonov)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Date: 1 Jan 1993 03:35:02 -0500
Organization: UUNET Technologies Inc, Falls Church, VA
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net
Keywords: Han Kanji Katakana Hirugana ISO10646 Unicode Codepages

In article <8492@charon.cwi.nl> dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) writes:
> > My point was that there obviously are identifyable meta-alpahbets
> > covering several languages.
>I do think that the number in several is very small.

With a trivial trick of including several codes for identical glyphs
for letters from different languages you can put all of them in ONE
meta-alphabet.

It's a matter of compromise, as you understand.

As for "several" my estimate is that all we need is about 15-20
meta-alpabets. You simply underestimate the number of languages
based on the same grapho-phonetical sets.
In my native Nothern Caucasus people speak (and write) in more than
300 languages -- but most of them have cyrillic-based written form
designed after the region was appended to the Russian Empire.

>Still wrong.  Take the dutch ij... 
>So how would the keyboard driver deal
>with the 'ij' combination?  When I enter the combination it can either be
>the single letter ij (some dutch people say there is no such single letter),
>or two letters, depending on context.  So must the keyboard driver look
>at the context (e.g. it is a french loadnword like bijoux so that ij is
>really two letters), or what?

There are different solutions -- the radical one is to tell the driver
which language you're writing in (somehow i'm used to type on four
different keyboards and find that the "native" layout for the language
is simply the best). Another is to use the _compose_ key.

Specifying the language is a good tone -- and you do it anyway if your
editor supports interactive spell-checking. Most people will never
bother to use more than two languages anyway, so it can simply be
a couple of assignable registers toggled by, say, right Alt.

The problem should be localized at the one place (input) -- instead of
having *every* application to keep (or even worse - to ask!) the
language.

>Sorting is extremely context sensitive, even in a single language.

Yes, sure. Then, why exaggregate the problem even more?

>As
>another person already mentioned in english you sort McNeill as if it
>is MacNeill.  Similar the abbreviation St. which can be either Street or
>Saint.  (Moreover, when sorting names I would prefer to sort C. van der Bilt
>under V if it is an American and under B if it is a Dutchman ;-).)

Sorting names and addresses is a big problem everywhere -- and (as always)
the simpliest solution is the best -- to sort everything LITERALLY.
The real-world applications work this way; after breaking several times
on names like MCAAN XIOY banks revert to placing MARX between MCNEILL
and MACNEILL. Dunno about UK but in US with its diverse population
the problem is not new. There is a lot of arguments for abolishing
separating names on first, middle and last because there are cultures
where names cannot be separated or should be modified or simply have
the different order of names.

After airplanes crossed the ocean you can relay on your local
knowledge no more. British Telecom already dropped titles in
phone books, didn't they?

>To me it appears very silly to put more than superficial sorting
>information in the encoding. 

It is NOT silly if it covers 99.9% of all practical applications.

>The remainder must be handled by the
>applications (through library programs).  And indeed, that may require
>table look-up.

It is not just table lookup if you didn't understand it yet. The problem
with Unicode is that in order to sort (or even capitalise) strings your
program should KNOW the language the strings are in -- therefore
you can use already existent 8-bit encodings just as well. Extended
Unicode sequences carry NO useful information IF the particular
alphabet is already known. Now, if we're going this way why do we need
Unicode at all? We're back to the original problem but this time with more
complexities. It is THAT simple.

I'm often amazed how people fail to see obvious things.

> > The idea of visual encoding (and one letter-onr glyph is nothing more
> > than a compressed image of the text) is simply wrong because it
> > drops valuable information readily available at the point of the CREATION
> > of the text but not later.
>But as I said, such information is not readily available at the point of
>creation, only if the system asks everytime. 

It should ask at some time anyway -- and it is much better when
"this name is Dutch" is entered by a teller in Europe who typed the name
in than by an operator in Honkong who may be well ignorant about
the difference between Dutch and Spanish.

Telling the language is NOT annoying -- most of the time it's one
or the two languages and nobody switches between them often anyway.

Finally, in the most places the language was told once by the
person who set up the system and the system surely won't forget it.

>That would be silly as most text is not sorted anyway.

Really? I guess you're seriously wrong. Even USENET postings get
clipped by words and sorted by thesaurus-collecting algorithms of
things like grapeVINE. And ALL words people enter into *real-life*
applications (banking, mailing, legal, publishing) got eventually sorted.
It's easy to miss -- but statistics is that 30% of computing power
gets spent on *sorting* (i can't recall source -- apparently some
known book by Myers (sp?) or Brooks).

It is safe to assume that practically any published (or shared) text
(or parts of it like title) will be sorted somewhere.

--vadim