
I Can Text You a Pile of Poo, but I Can’t Write My Name - CapacitorSet
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name
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saurik
> But Bengalis were forced to make similar orthographic contortions just to
> write a simple email: ত + ্ + ‍ = ‍ৎ (the third character is the invisible
> “zero width joiner”).

> But the final letter [of my name] has still not been given its own Unicode
> character, so I have to use a substitute.

I am having a difficult time determining, partly due to the example in the
previous paragraph, whether the issue is that Unicode can't represent the
final character of the writer's name using a single/correct glyph or if that
glyph simply requires multiple codepoints (at which point I would argue this
is an issue with their keyboard or text editor, not the storage format of the
text).

~~~
wahern
It's sort of a poor example, especially when the skin tone emojis also use
combining characters.

The overall frustration is understandable, I'm just not sure if there are any
easy remedies, especially if the metric for success is assigning a code point
to every grapheme that some group considers sufficiently distinctive. Having a
more diverse leadership might help, as the author suggests. But his anecdotes
aren't convincing. I'd like to see a more comprehensive critique of the
diversity of the leadership, particularly regarding their credentials and
experience.

English readers would never accept a Greco Unification because English
orthography _already_ went through tremendous simplification and unification
at the behest of technological necessity, starting from the printing press but
especially since the advent of computers. European languages generally are far
along that path. Excepting the Western/Cyrillic divide, the European languages
he described are already substantially unified, which he perhaps unwittingly
takes for granted. To some extent the author is merely experiencing what
European authors began experiencing long ago; namely, yet another culture
clash with modernity.

Which isn't to say that European orthography isn't privileged. Just that the
scope of that privilege can be more difficult to determine than one would
think given the current state of affairs. To some extent European orthography
might seem privileged because it was already drastically simplified and
already underwent significant unification. Yes, there are many one-off
esoteric European glyphs, but you can't judge how "privileged" that is without
accounting for all the orthography discarded and abandoned, even in the past
century.

Also, it's worth realizing that the Unicode project is literally destined to
fail in the sense that languages and meaning are constantly changing. Unicode
will always struggle with the inherent limitations of the goal. Arguably non-
syllabic scripts are especially difficult to deal with in this manner. We
should be careful not to equivocate written languages. English is, frankly,
much easier to accommodate than many other languages, especially considering
how English accommodated to technology.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that emojis were originally a Japanese
phenomenon. More specifically (lest people think I forgot about the long
history of ASCII emoji), AFAIU Unicode began accepting emojis at the behest of
Japanese companies, and the first groups of glyphs were from Japan.
Understanding why they first evolved in Japan might actually go a long way to
addressing some of the author's questions and criticisms.

