
What's new in Unicode 7.0? - conductor
http://babelstone.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/whats-new-in-unicode-70.html
======
brownbat
The current dispute between Marshallese and Latvian is a phenomenal example of
the sort of puzzles here.

Apparently the Marshallese require some characters to display with cedillas,
and Latvian has characters traditionally named "(some letter) WITH CEDILLA"
even though they are displayed with commas... so if you just say "LETTER WITH
CEDILLA" it's now not clear whether you mean cedilla or comma, and correcting
it would break Latvian.

[http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2013/13128-latvian-marshal-
adhoc....](http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2013/13128-latvian-marshal-adhoc.pdf)

Not sure how they do this work without going slowly insane.

~~~
userulluipeste
The same scenario - S and T with cedillas, used in Turkish and (used to be)
used in Romanian. Only that Romanian letters should be with comma, not
cedillas (on small scale the difference is not distinguishable). So it's
Romanian vs Turkish? No, it isn't! S and T with commas were added for Romanian
later (somewhere waaay separate from other Romanian diacritics) in the Unicode
set and everybody is happy! ...and sane.

~~~
brownbat
Latvian and Marshallese is slightly more confusing, because Latvian commas are
already called cedillas in the unicode names, despite not actually being
cedillas.

Sure, they'll just extend by adding something like "MARSHALLESE CEDILLA" to
refer to actual cedillas. But it still must be frustrating to discover areas
where traditional orthographic names are ambiguous or even misleading.

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pilsetnieks
Isn't Linear A a little bit of an overkill? I mean, if we at least knew what
it meant, maybe then, but now?

~~~
igravious
And "MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING" is not overkill?

Seems to devalue the entire standard and project.

edit: Unicode should be universally useful. This is not. I would love to be
convinced otherwise however .....

~~~
jrochkind1
You want each character, on it's own, to be _universally_ useful? That's a
pretty high standard, there wouldn't be very many characters to meet it and
include in the repertoire.

Pretty much every character that exists is useful to some people some time,
but not every person all the time.

~~~
snogglethorpe
... and emoji, in particular, are actually very useful (and well-used) for
average every-day communication amongst huge numbers of people.

Obviously some are going to be _more_ useful than others, but it would be
quite difficult to find a subset of them that are obviously so completely
useless that they should be dropped.

The Unicode consortium's practice of just adopting complete scripts wholesale
is vastly simpler and works out quite well in practice.

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acqq
I see one character that will be hugely successful now that it's standardized:
1f595

~~~
Aldo_MX
🖕

DISCLAIMER: This is not a personal attack but a demonstration of the
character.

~~~
gcb0
Nice square.

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jayfuerstenberg
Surprising that it took this long to introduce the middle finger as a standard
character.

Emails will never be the same again.

~~~
frozenport
....................../´¯/)

....................,/¯../

.................../..../

............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸

........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\

........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...')

.........\\.................'...../

..........''...\\.......... _.·´

............\\..............(

..............\\.............\\...

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etfb
Still no Klingon? Quvatlh!

~~~
3JPLW
Here's an interesting response[1] from Michael Everson back in 1997. Also
interesting is that there's already a reserved area in the CSUR (ConScript
Unicode Registry) for it[2], and you may even have a font that shows it[3]! I
was surprised I had one: !

[1]. [http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-
Old/UML...](http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-
Old/UML009/0146.html)

[2].
[http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/klingon.html](http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/klingon.html)

[3].
[http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Test_Klingon.html](http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Test_Klingon.html)

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xrt
They lost me when they went to 21 bits.

~~~
xrt
So a middle finger gets fewer downvotes than a technical commentary. awesome.

~~~
derleth
That wasn't a technical commentary.

