Agree.
So far "the progress" implied understanding (discovering) previously unknown things. AI is exactly the opposite: "I don't understand how, but it sorta works!"
The safest path is to consider it a blob. There is some library that can render it magically and that's the only wise thing you can do. The internal structure is hard to understand. Also, definitions change over time. So, you better leave it all to professionals.
The thing about Unicode is.... anybody who tried to do it “more simple” would eventually just develop a crappier version of Unicode.
Unicode is complex because the sum of all human language is complex. Short of a ground up rewrite of the worlds languages, you cannot boil away most of that complexity... it has to go somewhere.
And even if you did manage to “rewrite” the worlds languages to be simple and remove accidental complexity
I assert that over centuries it would devolve right back into a complex mess again. Why? Languages represent (and literally shape and constrain) how humans think and humans are a messy bunch of meat sacks living in a huge world rich in weird crazy things to feel and talk about.
There are definitely crappy things about Unicode that are separate from language.
- Several writing systems are widely scattered across multiple ‘Supplement’/‘Extended’/‘Extensions’ blocks.
- Operators (e.g. combining forms, joiners) are a mishmash of postfix, infix, and halffix. They should have been (a) in an easily tested reserved block (e.g. 0xF0nn for binary operators, 0xFmnn for unary), so that you could parse over a sequence even if it contains specific operators from a later version — i.e. separate syntax from semantics, and (b) uniformly prefix, so that read-ahead isn't required to find the end of a sequence (and dead keys become just like normal characters).
I wonder why Mediterranean nations switched from ideograms to alphabet as soon as one was invented. Probably they did not have enough surplus grain to feed something like the Unicode consortium?
Hieroglyphics weren't really ideographic after a very early point, because it's a pain in the ass making up new symbols for every word. Very quickly, it transitioned to being largely an abjad, representing only consonants. Abjads work reasonably well for semitic languages, as the consonantal roots of words carry the meaning and a reader would be able to fill in the vowels themselves via context.
According to the account I've heard, it's the greeks who invented the alphabet, by accident. The Phoenician script used single symbols to represent consonants, including the glottal stop (and some pharyngeal consonant that would likely be subject to a similar process, iirc). The glottal stop was represented by aleph, and because Greek didn't have contrastive glottal stops in its phoneme inventory, Greeks just interpreted the vowel that followed it as what the symbol was meant to represent.
It's a bit of a just so story, but also completely plausible.
An alphabet (or syllabary, abjad, abugida) has a small set of symbols that can express anything, which means that it could be used by people who did something other than read and write for a living. Probably no accident that the first to catch on, and the root of possibly all others, was spread by Phoenician traders.
The technique itself is indeed very elegant.
reply