On: Life Before Unicode

[quickthrower2]

The ‘u’ in ruby and run sounds different. English writing is not phonetic. Arabic I think pretty much is though.

[WalterBright → quickthrower2]

> English writing is not phonetic.

It's phonetic enough to work well as one. Teaching kids to read by sounding out the words works far better than any other method (like look-say).

Have fun punishing students by making them learn 10,000 hieroglyphs instead.

[quickthrower2 → WalterBright]

I’m a bit lost as you were talking about character encoding with phonetics originally and I couldn’t picture how that would work.

With kids yes in would agree sounding out (and pointing out exceptions to the rule) works well enough. But I’m no teacher!

[WalterBright → quickthrower2]

There's a bit of a misunderstanding here. I was not talking about encoding phonetic sounds into Unicode. Unicode should not imply sounds or meaning.

Unicode is about visual representation.

The argument about phonetic alphabets is they are superior to hieroglyphs.