
Two Dots Too Many (2008) - vilhelm_s
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73
======
pluma
Atatürk gave Turkey a lot of great things. The alphabet isn't one of them. The
dotted/dotless "i" in Turkish is just plain broken and there's no way to
support it without 100% confidence in the text's language (which is impossible
in the real world because multi-language users are a thing).

For anyone not familiar with the problem, the two variants of the letter "i"
in Turkish are considered two separate letters but neither the dotless nor the
dotted "i" is compatible with the non-Turkish "i" in lower and upper case:

* the lower case of upper case "I" is the dotless "ı" (not "i" as everywhere else)

* the upper case of lower case "i" is the dotted "İ" (not "I" as everywhere else)

This is basically a bug in the original specification (ca. 19th century) that
was never fixed and now causes all kinds of problems for anyone trying to
support it (because languages no longer live in isolation).

~~~
provemewrong
>* the lower case of upper case "I" is the dotless "ı" (not "i" as everywhere
else)

>* the upper case of lower case "i" is the dotted "İ" (not "I" as everywhere
else)

It does make sense though.

~~~
raldi
Does it, though? Would you also say it would make more sense for the lowercase
B to have two enclosed spaces instead of just one?

~~~
thaumasiotes
Would it make more sense to have just one glyph for a letter instead of two?
Of course. We're not getting anything out of making the distinction.

------
antihero
Honestly though, what killed these people was a stupidity - surely if someone
says something this nasty where there's an obvious ambiguity in the language,
stabbing them over it without asking first is just ridiculous behaviour.

~~~
serve_yay
Sure. And the bug should also be fixed.

Pretty much everyone here is changing the subject, so to speak, which I find
telling in itself.

~~~
Retra
Telling of what, exactly?

------
roel_v
Solid advise in this article: "Another is that it is best not to kill people
who make you angry until you have carefully investigated the situation, if
then."

------
chasing
> The Turkish newspaper Hürriyet reports a tragic consequence of the failure
> to localize cell phones.

Which assumes that murder is an appropriate response when someone calls
someone else a whore...

------
dmitrig01
Autocorrect kills

~~~
thaumasiotes
In this case (as reported), the message was correct, but the recipient's phone
wasn't capable of displaying Turkish letters.

------
serve_yay
Wow, what a disaster.

