On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 7:18 PM, Cory Benfield <c...@lukasa.co.uk> wrote: > The many glyphs that exist for writing various human languages are not > inefficiency to be optimised away. Further, I should note that most places to > not legislate about what character sets are acceptable to transcribe their > languages. Indeed, plenty of non-romance-language-speakers have found ways to > transcribe their languages of choice into the limited 8-bit character sets > that the Anglophone world propagated: take a look at Arabish for the best > kind of example of this behaviour, where "الجو عامل ايه النهارده فى > إسكندرية؟" will get rendered as "el gaw 3amel eh elnaharda f eskendereya?” >
I've worked with transliterations enough to have built myself a dedicated translit tool. It's pretty straight-forward to come up with something you can type on a US-English keyboard (eg "a\o" for "å", and "d\-" for "đ"), and in some cases, it helps with visual/audio synchronization, but nobody would ever claim that it's the best way to represent that language. https://github.com/Rosuav/LetItTrans/blob/master/25%20languages.srt > But I think you’re in a tiny minority of people who believe that all > languages should be rendered in the same script. I can think of only two > reasons to argue for this: > > 1. Dealing with lots of scripts is technologically tricky and it would be > better if we didn’t bother. This is the anti-Unicode argument, and it’s a > weak argument, though it has the advantage of being internally consistent. > 2. There is some genuine harm caused by learning non-ASCII scripts. #1 does carry a decent bit of weight, but only if you start with the assumption that "characters are bytes". If you once shed that assumption (and the related assumption that "characters are 16-bit numbers"), the only weight it carries is "right-to-left text is hard"... and let's face it, that *is* hard, but there are far, far harder problems in computing. Oh wait. Naming things. In Hebrew. That's hard. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
