An assessment of the Unicode standard
r
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/db90a9629b92aab0/b0385050b4c6c84e?hl=en&lnk=raot#b0385050b4c6c84e
and it raised some fundamental philophosical questions to me about
natural languages and Unicode. Which IMO * Unicode* is simply a monkey
patch for this soup of multiple languages we have to deal with in
programming and communication.
Unicode (*puke*) seems nothing more than a brain fart of morons. And
sadly it was created by CS majors who i assumed used logic and
deductive reasoning but i must be wrong. Why should the larger world
keep supporting such antiquated languages and character sets through
Unicode? What purpose does this serve? Are we merely trying to make
everyone happy? A sort of Utopian free-language-love-fest-kinda-
thing?
But there is a larger problem that is at the heart of Unicode itself,
and it has to do with this multi-language/multi-culture world we live
in. Even today in 2009 AD with all our technology and advancements we
still live in a dark ages of societal communication. Of the many
things that divide us such as race, color, religion, geography, blah,
the most perplexing and devastating seems to be why have we not
accepted a single global language for all to speak.
Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of
characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language. Why do we
need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages
have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of Chinese
language. The A-Z char set is flawless!
Some may say well how can we possibly force countries/people to speak/
code in a uniform manner? Well that's simple, you just stop supporting
their cryptic languages by dumping Unicode and returning to the
beautiful ASCII and adopting English as the universal world language.
Why English? Well because it is so widely spoken. But whatever we
choose just choose one language and stick with it, perfect it, and
maintain it.
IMO Multiple languages are barriers to communication, collaboration,
and the continuation of our future evolution as intelligent Human
beings and this language multiplicity will comprise our future until
it is reigned in and utterly destroyed. And i think most of you are
missing how important this really is to our future. And so these
problems bring me to the main subject of this thread "Unicode Sucks"
Now you may say to yourself "I am not a sociologist i am a programmer,
so why should i give a flying fig about natural languages or Unicode,
i just accept things as they are". Well yes you could just go on
accepting the status quo that is surely the easy route, but your life
would be so much easier if you crusaded for change.
BUT STOP!, before i go any further i want to respond to what i know
will be condemnation from the sociology nuts out there. Yes
multiculturalism is great, yes art is great, but if you can't see how
the ability to communicate is severely damperd by multi-languages then
you only *feel* with your heart but you apparently have no ability to
reason with your mind intelligently.
[nested thoughts]
A few months ago i was watching some tear-jerking documentary called
something like "Save the Languages" or "The dying languages" blah! In
the documentary these two bleeding-heart-ivy-leaguers were running all
over the world to document some obscure languages that were on the
verge of extinction. And at one utterly amazing point in the episode
they start crying and moaning for the loss of these languages like
their own mother had died a horrible death. I watched all this in much
horror and disbelief with jaw-dropped and i am still scared by the
thought that people actually buy into this BS! Has the world gone mad?
[back on track]
The death of a language is as natural as the death of a flower, or a
fish, or even the ever long oxidation of aluminum coke can. When a
life form dies it brings life to the next generation. With languages,
each death compiles upon the last and we are one step closer to the
unifying language that we all so disparately need. We should herald
the death of the languages like the jazz funerals of New Orleans with
much happiness and fanfare for there is no reason to be sad.
It's called evolution people! Ever heard of science? So ditch the
useless Unicode and save us all a few keystrokes and bottles of
aspirin for the persistent headaches! Simplicity is beautiful!!
Chris Jones
> >
> > Unicode (*puke*) seems nothing more than a brain fart of morons. And
> > sadly it was created by CS majors who i assumed used logic and
> > deductive reasoning but i must be wrong. Why should the larger world
> > keep supporting such antiquated languages and character sets through
> > Unicode? What purpose does this serve? Are we merely trying to make
> > everyone happy? A sort of Utopian free-language-love-fest-kinda-
> > thing?
> >
>
> (poorly) his rants.
:-)
CJ
John Machin
>
> Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of
> characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language. Why do we
> need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages
> have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of Chinese
> language.
The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite
capable of expression in ASCII ("r tongzhi shi sha gua") and doesn't
have those pesky it's/its problems.
> The A-Z char set is flawless!
... for expressing the sounds of a very limited number of languages,
and English is *NOT* one of those.
Neil Hodgson
> Unicode (*puke*) seems nothing more than a brain fart of morons. And
> sadly it was created by CS majors who i assumed used logic and
> deductive reasoning but i must be wrong. Why should the larger world
> keep supporting such antiquated languages and character sets through
> Unicode? What purpose does this serve? Are we merely trying to make
> everyone happy? A sort of Utopian free-language-love-fest-kinda-
> thing?
Wow, I like this world you live in: all that altruism! Unicode was
developed by corporations from the US left coast in order to sell their
products in foreign markets at minimal cost.
Neil
r
> On Aug 30, 8:46 am, r <rt8...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite
> capable of expression in ASCII ("r tongzhi shi sha gua") and doesn't
> have those pesky it's/its problems.
Oh yes of course it is the most widely spoken amongst Chinese people
since one in every five people on this earth are Chinese. What i meant
to say was that English language is more widespread outside of
"normal" English speaking countries -- of course as a result of
colonialism, and arguably, imperialism. ;)
r
wrote:
> Wow, I like this world you live in: all that altruism!
Well if i don't who will? *shrugs*
> Unicode was
> developed by corporations from the US left coast in order to sell their
> products in foreign markets at minimal cost.
So why the heck are we supporting such capitalistic implementations as
Unicode. Sure we must support a winders installer but Unicode, dump
it! We don't support a Python group in Chinese or French, so why this?
Makes no sense to me really. Let M$ deal with it.
Benjamin Peterson
\\
>
> Unicode was
> developed by corporations from the US left coast in order to sell their
> products in foreign markets at minimal cost.
Like Sanskrit or Snowman language?
Neil Hodgson
> Like Sanskrit or Snowman language?
Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also
useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian
languages.
Not sure if you are referring to the ☃ snowman character or Arctic
region languages like Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing like ᐲᐦᒑᔨᕽ
which were added to Unicode 8 years after the initial version. I'd guess
that was added from political rather than marketing motives. ☃ was
required since it was present in Japanese character sets.
Neil
Anny Mous
> Of the many
> things that divide us such as race, color, religion, geography, blah,
> the most perplexing and devastating seems to be why have we not
> accepted a single global language for all to speak.
I agree 1000% and obviously we should make Klingon that global language. Or
possibly the Black Tongue of the Mordor Orcs, which is much better for
cursing. I haven't decided yet.
> Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of
> characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language. Why do we
> need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages
> have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of Chinese
> language. The A-Z char set is flawless!
How do we distinguish resume from résumé without accents?
Even when we succeed in banning all languages that can't be written using
A-Z, what do we do about the vast number of legacy documents? How do we
write about obsolete English letters like Ð and Þ without Unicode?
How do we write mathematical and scientific documents without characters
like Δ → λ ∫ and ∞ ?
What do we use to replace typographic symbols and dingbats like † without
Unicode?
> Some may say well how can we possibly force countries/people to speak/
> code in a uniform manner? Well that's simple, you just stop supporting
> their cryptic languages by dumping Unicode and returning to the
> beautiful ASCII and adopting English as the universal world language.
> Why English? Well because it is so widely spoken.
World population: 6.7 billion
Number of native Mandarin speakers: 873 million
Number of native Hindi speakers: 370 million
Number of native Spanish speakers: 350 million
Number of native English speakers: 340 million
Total number of Mandarin speakers: 1051 million
Total number of English speakers: 510 million
http://www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm
Whichever way you look at it, we should all convert to Mandarin, not
English. Looks like we still need Unicode.
Besides, given that the US would be bankrupt if not for Chinese loans, do
you really want to upset them by suggesting their language sucks?
> But whatever we
> choose just choose one language and stick with it, perfect it, and
> maintain it.
Just ask the Academie Francaise how well that works!
Why stop with A-Z? We can improve on 26 letters. In the first year we should
replace the soft 'c' with 's'. Any sivilized language will sertainly be
better off with this change. The hard 'c' will be dropped in favour of 'k',
which will klear up much konfusion and allow one key less on keyboards.
In the sekond year I expect publik enthusiasm to grow, allowing us to
replace the troublesome 'ph' with 'f', which will make words
like 'fotograf' twenty persent shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to
permit more komplikated changes. We will enkourage the removal of double
leters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil
agre that the horible mes of the silent 'e' is disgrasful.
By the fourth yer, peopl wil be reseptiv to replasing 'th' with 'z' and 'w'
with 'v'. Zis vil be a grat improvment.
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary 'o' kan be dropd from vords kontaining 'ou'
and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor
trubls or difikultis and everivun vil find it ezi to understand ech ozer.
ZE DREM VIL FINALI COM TRU!
> IMO Multiple languages are barriers to communication, collaboration,
> and the continuation of our future evolution as intelligent Human
> beings and this language multiplicity will comprise our future until
> it is reigned in and utterly destroyed.
Yes, because language differences have utterly destroyed us so many times in
the past!
Have you thought about the difference between China, with one culture and
one spoken language for thousands of years, and Europe, with dozens of
competing cultures, competing governments, and alternate languages for just
as long? If multiple languages are so harmful, why was it the British,
French, Japanese, Russians, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians and
Americans who were occupying China during the Opium Wars and the Boxer
Rebellion, instead of the other way around?
Strength comes from diversity, not monoculture.
Chris Jones
> Benjamin Peterson:
> > Like Sanskrit or Snowman language?
> Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also
> useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian
> languages.
Is the implication that the principal usefulness of such languages as
Hindi and "other Indian languages" is us selling "things" to them..? I
am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of voice
rather offensive, considering that you are referring to a culture that's
about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and certainly deserves
our respect.
Maybe you didn't notice, but our plants shut down many years ago.. They
are selling _us_ their wares.
> Not sure if you are referring to the snowman character or Arctic
> region languages like Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing like ᐲᐦᒑᔨᕽ
> which were added to Unicode 8 years after the initial version. I'd
> guess that was added from political rather than marketing motives. ☃
> was required since it was present in Japanese character sets.
Oh.. so.. now Unicode is not only about marketing.. there is also a
political "aspect".. polytonic Greek, Runic, Shavian, Glagolitic,
Carian, Phoenician, Lydian, Cuneiform, not to mention Mathematical
symbols, Braille, Domino Tiles, the IPA..? What was I thinking..?
Nothing personal, I assure you.. maybe I misunderstood what you were
saying.
In any event, you shouldn't feed the troll, even if he's teething.
CJ
John Nagle
> I was reading the thread here...
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/db90a9629b92aab0/b0385050b4c6c84e?hl=en&lnk=raot#b0385050b4c6c84e
>
> and it raised some fundamental philophosical questions
Rant ignored.
Actually, Python 3.x seems finally to have character sets right.
There's "bytes", for uninterpreted binary data, Unicode, and
proper ASCII, 0..127. Within Python, we finally got rid of
"upper code pages".
(I wish the HTML standards people would do the same. HTML 5
should have been ASCII only (with the "&" escapes if desired)
or Unicode. No "Latin-1", no upper code pages, no JIS, etc.)
>
> [nested thoughts]
> A few months ago i was watching some tear-jerking documentary called
> something like "Save the Languages" or "The dying languages" blah!
It may be a bit much that Unicode supports Cretan Linear B.
John Nagle
Terry Reedy
> natural languages and Unicode. Which IMO * Unicode* is simply a monkey
> patch for this soup of multiple languages we have to deal with in
> programming and communication.
A somewhat fair charactierization.
[snip]
> everyone happy? A sort of Utopian free-language-love-fest-kinda-
> thing?
Not utopian, but pragmatically political. Before unicode, and still
today, we had and have multiple codes. Multiple ascii extenstions for
European languages and even multiple codes just for Japanese. To get
people in the major computing countries, including Japan, to agree to
eventually replace their national codes with one worldwide code, some
kludgy compromises were made.
> language. The A-Z char set is flawless!
Hardly. There are too few characters. A basic set should have at least
50. The international phonetic alphabet (IPA) has about 150. Here is a
true Utopian proposal for you (from a non-CS major ;-): develop an
extended IPA 256-character set with just a few control chars (rather
than 32) and punctuation and other markers. Then develop dictionaries to
translate texts in every languange and char set into and back out of
this universal character set.
Fat chance of approval, even if techical issues were resolved.
> Some may say well how can we possibly force countries/people to speak/
> code in a uniform manner? Well that's simple, you just stop supporting
> their cryptic languages by dumping Unicode and returning to the
> beautiful ASCII
But most everyone outside the US was not using ascii precisely because
it did not support their language.
Get over the imperfections of unicode. It improves on the prior status quo.
Terry Jan Reedy
steve
> I was reading the thread here...
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/db90a9629b92aab0/b0385050b4c6c84e?hl=en&lnk=raot#b0385050b4c6c84e
> ...
> It's called evolution people! Ever heard of science? So ditch the
> useless Unicode and save us all a few keystrokes and bottles of
> aspirin for the persistent headaches! Simplicity is beautiful!!
You are right ! In the same vein, we should all also standardize on using the
Java language for programming, after all /everybody/ writes code in Java.
cheers,
- steve
--
random non tech spiel: http://lonetwin.blogspot.com/
tech randomness: http://lonehacks.blogspot.com/
what i'm stumbling into: http://lonetwin.stumbleupon.com/
Steven D'Aprano
> Not sure if you are referring to the ☃ snowman character or Arctic
> region languages like Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing like ᐲᐦᒑᔨᕽ
> which were added to Unicode 8 years after the initial version. I'd guess
> that was added from political rather than marketing motives. ☃ was
> required since it was present in Japanese character sets.
If I recall correctly, the snowman was specifically added at the request
of Japanese television producers, because it is a standard glyph used for
representing snow when showing the weather on TV.
Unicode's stated aim is to have a single universal standard for all
characters needed for communication. From the Unicode Consortium:
[quote]
What is Unicode?
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the
platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
...
Even for a single language like English no single encoding was adequate
for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.
These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two
encodings can use the same number for two different characters, or use
different numbers for the same character. Any given computer (especially
servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever data is
passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs
the risk of corruption.
Unicode is changing all that!
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the
platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
[end quote]
And from the FAQs:
[quote]
Unicode covers all the characters for all the writing systems of the
world, modern and ancient. It also includes technical symbols,
punctuations, and many other characters used in writing text.
[end quote]
It's not just about supporting languages used by foreigners too stupid to
speak English (sarcasm!). It's about supporting business users who want a
standard way of referring to dingbats and pictographs, historians who
need to deal with ancient writings and obsolete characters, scientists
and mathematicians who want to use mathematical symbols, editors and book
publishers who want to use their own typographic symbols, including
Braille, musical symbols, and even TV producers who want to include
snowmen on their weather charts.
The Unicode system replaces dozens of incompatible, clashing systems with
a single universal, extensible system. Why would anyone want to go back
to the Bad Old Days where you couldn't transfer data from one OS to
another, or even from one application to another, without quote marks
turning into mathematical symbols or boxes?
--
Steven
Steven D'Aprano
> It may be a bit much that Unicode supports Cretan Linear B.
Thousands of historians who need to discuss Linear B would disagree.
Well, hundreds.
There are tens of thousands of characters available. If there's room for
chess pieces, dingbats with drop shadows and numbers inside circles,
there's room for actual characters from real (if extinct) languages.
--
Steven
Neil Hodgson
> Is the implication that the principal usefulness of such languages as
> Hindi and "other Indian languages" is us selling "things" to them..?
Unicode was developed by a group of US corporations: Xerox, Apple,
Sun, Microsoft, ... The main motivation was to avoid dealing with
multiple character set encodings since this was difficult, time
consuming and expensive.
> I
> am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of voice
> rather offensive, considering that you are referring to a culture that's
> about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and certainly deserves
> our respect.
Eh? Was Unicode developed in India? China? What precisely is
direspectful here? Is there a significant population that regards
Unicode as their 'holy patrimony' that will suffer distress due to my
post?
> Maybe you didn't notice, but our plants shut down many years ago.. They
> are selling _us_ their wares.
Maybe your plants shut down but some of the plants I have worked at
(such as the steelworks at Port Kembla) are still successfully exporting
to Asia.
Neil
Steven D'Aprano
> On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:07:17PM EDT, Neil Hodgson wrote:
>> Benjamin Peterson:
>
>> > Like Sanskrit or Snowman language?
>
>> Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also
>> useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian
>> languages.
>
> Is the implication that the principal usefulness of such languages as
> Hindi and "other Indian languages" is us selling "things" to them..? I
> am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of voice
> rather offensive,
I think Neil's point is that Unicode has succeeded in the wider world,
outside of academic circles, because of the commercial need to
communicate between cultures using different character sets. I suppose he
could have worded it better, but fundamentally he's right: without the
commercial need to trade across the world (information as well as
physical goods) I doubt Unicode would be anything more than an
interesting curiosity of use only to a few academics and linguists.
> considering that you are referring to a culture that's
> about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and certainly deserves
> our respect.
Older, certainly, but richer? There's a reason that Indians come to the
West rather than Westerners going to India. As Terry Pratchet has
written, age is not linked to wisdom -- just because somebody is old,
doesn't mean they're wise, perhaps they've just been stupid for a very
long time. The same goes for cultures: old doesn't mean better.
Indian culture has been responsible for many wonderful things over the
millennia, but the cast system is not one of them, and any culture which
glorified sati (suttee) as an act of piety is not one we should look up
to. Sati was probably rare even at the height of it's popularity, and
vanishingly rare now, and arguably could even be defended as the right of
an adult to end their own life when they see fit, but dowry-burning is
outright murder and is sadly very common across the Indian sub-continent:
some estimates suggest that in the mid-1990s there were nearly 6000 such
murders a year in India.
If we are to be truly non-racist, we must recognise that the West does
not have a monopoly on wickedness, ignorance, spite and sheer awfulness.
In any case, I'm not sure we should be talking about Indian culture in
the singular -- India is about as large as Western Europe, significantly
more varied, and the culture has changed over time. The India which
treated the Karma Sutra as a holy book is hardly the same India where
people literally rioted in the street because Richard Gere gave the
actress Shilpa Shetty a couple of rather theatrical and silly kisses on
the cheek.
--
Steven
garabik-ne...@kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk
> Some may say well how can we possibly force countries/people to speak/
> code in a uniform manner? Well that's simple, you just stop supporting
> their cryptic languages by dumping Unicode and returning to the
> beautiful ASCII and adopting English as the universal world language.
> choose just choose one language and stick with it, perfect it, and
> maintain it.
>
Y’know, it is naïve to think that the “beautiful” ASCII is
sufficient for English…
Besides, there is the APL... (though, you are right, we should dump
those crappy old languages and use Python exclusively)
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
| Radovan Garabík http://kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk |
-----------------------------------------------------------
Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus.
Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
Thorsten Kampe
> We don't support a Python group in Chinese or French, so why this?
"We" do - you don't (or to be more realistic, you simply didn't know
it).
> Makes no sense to me really.
Like probably 99.99999% of all things you hear, read, see and encounter
during the day.
By the way: the dumbness of your "Unicode rant" would have even ashamed
the great XL himself.
Thorsten
Thorsten Kampe
> Chris Jones:
>
> > I am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of
> > voice rather offensive, considering that you are referring to a
> > culture that's about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and
> > certainly deserves our respect.
>
> Eh? Was Unicode developed in India? China?
Chris was obviously talking about Sanskrit...
Thorsten
Thorsten Kampe
> On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:07:17PM EDT, Neil Hodgson wrote:
> > Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also
> > useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian
> > languages.
>
> Is the implication that the principal usefulness of such languages as
> Hindi and "other Indian languages" is us selling "things" to them..? I
> am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of voice
> rather offensive, considering that you are referring to a culture that's
> about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and certainly deserves
> our respect.
Neil was obviously talking about Devanagari. Please also mind the
principal difference between Neil's "also useful" and your "principal
useful(ness)".
Thorsten
Antoine Pitrou
>
> Why should the larger world
> keep supporting such antiquated languages and character sets through
> Unicode? What purpose does this serve? Are we merely trying to make
> everyone happy? A sort of Utopian free-language-love-fest-kinda-
> thing?
Can you go and troll somewhere else?
Thanks.
Antoine.
Thorsten Kampe
> On Aug 30, 8:46 am, r <rt8...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of
> > characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language. Why do we
> > need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages
> > have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of
> > Chinese language.
>
> The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite
> capable of expression in ASCII ("r tongzhi shi sha gua") and doesn't
> have those pesky it's/its problems.
You could also put it differently: the Chinese language (like any other
language) doesn't even have "characters". It's really funny to see how
someone who rants about Unicode doesn't event knows the most basic
facts.
Thorsten
Hendrik van Rooyen
I suspect that the alphabet is not ideal for representing the sounds of _any_
language, and I would look for my proof in the plethora of things that we use
when writing, other than the bare A-Z. - Punctuation, diacritics...
But what really started me thinking, after reading this post of John's, read
with Dennis'. - on the dissimilarity of the spoken and written Chinese - was
the basic dichotomy of the two systems - a symbol for a sound vs a symbol for
a word or an idea.
I know that when I read, I do not actually read the characters, I recognize
words, and only fall back to messing with characters when I hit something
unfamiliar.
So It would seem to me that r's "utopia" could sooner be realized if the
former system were abandoned in favour of the latter. - and Horrors! The
language of choice would not be English!
Not that I agree that it would be a Utopia, whatever the language - more like
a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught
first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal experience that
there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that
takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity would
be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and
progress would slow or stop.
- Hendrik
r
(snip)
> How do we distinguish resume from résumé without accents?
This is another quirk of some languages that befuddles me. What is
with the ongoing language pronunciation tutorial some languages have
turned into -- French is a good example (*puke*). Do you *really* need
those squiggly lines and cues above letters so you won't forget how to
pronounce a word. Pure ridiculousness!
> Even when we succeed in banning all languages that can't be written using
> A-Z, what do we do about the vast number of legacy documents? How do we
> write about obsolete English letters like Ð and Þ without Unicode?
Who gives a fig about obsolete languages, thank god they are dead and
let's move on!!
> > Some may say well how can we possibly force countries/people to speak/
> > code in a uniform manner? Well that's simple, you just stop supporting
> > their cryptic languages by dumping Unicode and returning to the
> > beautiful ASCII and adopting English as the universal world language.
> > Why English? Well because it is so widely spoken.
>
> World population: 6.7 billion
>
> Number of native Mandarin speakers: 873 million
> Number of native Hindi speakers: 370 million
> Number of native Spanish speakers: 350 million
> Number of native English speakers: 340 million
>
> Total number of Mandarin speakers: 1051 million
> Total number of English speakers: 510 million
>
> http://www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm
I was actually referring to countries where the majority of people
*actually* know what a computer is and how to use it... If there
culture has not caught up with western technology yet they are doomed
to the fate of native American Indians.
> Whichever way you look at it, we should all convert to Mandarin, not
> English. Looks like we still need Unicode.
see my last comment
(snip entertaining assumptions)
> Yes, because language differences have utterly destroyed us so many times in
> the past!
>
> Have you thought about the difference between China, with one culture and
> one spoken language for thousands of years, and Europe, with dozens of
> competing cultures, competing governments, and alternate languages for just
> as long? If multiple languages are so harmful, why was it the British,
> French, Japanese, Russians, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians and
> Americans who were occupying China during the Opium Wars and the Boxer
> Rebellion, instead of the other way around?
>
> Strength comes from diversity, not monoculture.
No strength comes from superior firepower. The Chinese culture stop
evolving thousands of years ago. Who invented gun powder? Yes the
Chinese and all they could do with it was create fireworks. Europeans
took gun powered and started a revolution that changes the world
forever -- for better and for worse, but that is how advancements
work. It wasn't until western influence came along and finally nudged
china into the 21st century. Europeans seek out technology and aren't
dragged down by an antiquated culture which is good for innovation. If
China with it's huge population thought like a European, they would
rule the earth for 10,000 years.
r
[snip ridiculous trolling]
> Thorsten
Hmm, I wonder who's sock puppet you are Thorsten?
John Machin
> On Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:05:24 +1000, Anny Mous <b1540...@tyldd.com>
> declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:
>
> > Have you thought about the difference between China, with one culture and
> > one spoken language for thousands of years, and Europe, with dozens of
>
... hence Chinese movies have subtitles in Chinese. And it can't
really be called one written language. For a start there are the
Traditional characters and the Simplified characters. Then there are
regional variations and add-ons e.g. the Hong Kong Special Character
Set (now added into Unicode): not academic-only stuff, includes
surnames, the "Hang" in Hang Seng Index and Hang Seng Bank, and the
5th character of the Chinese name of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking
Corporation Limited on the banknotes it issues.
> (the main two being mandarin and cantonese -- with enough differences
> between them that they might as well be spanish vs italian)
Mandarin and Cantonese are groups of languages/dialects. Rough figures
(millions): Mandarin 850, Wu 90, Min and Cantonese about 70 each. The
intelligibility comparison is more like Romanian vs Portuguese, or
Icelandic vs Dutch. I've heard that the PLA used Shanghainese (Wu
group) as code talkers just like the USMC used Navajos.
r
wrote:
(snip)
> I suspect that the alphabet is not ideal for representing the sounds of _any_
> language, and I would look for my proof in the plethora of things that we use
> when writing, other than the bare A-Z. - Punctuation, diacritics...
It can be made better and if that means add/removing letters or
redefining what a letter represents i am fine with that. I know first
hand the hypocrisy of the English language. I am thinking more on the
lines of English redux!
> Not that I agree that it would be a Utopia, whatever the language - more like
> a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught
> first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal experience that
> there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that
> takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity would
> be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and
> progress would slow or stop.
We already live in a Orwellian language nightmare. Have you seen much
change to the English language in your lifetime? i haven't. A language
must constantly evolve and trim the excess cruft that pollutes it. And
English has a mountain of cruft! After all our years on this planet i
think it's high time to perfect a simplified language for world-wide
usage.
r
> a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught
> first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal experience that
> there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that
> takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity would
> be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and
> progress would slow or stop.
>
> - Hendrik
What makes you think that diversity is lost with a single language? I
say more pollination will occur and the seed will be more potent since
all parties will contribute to the same pool. Sure there will be
idioms of different regions but that is to be expected. But at least
then i could make international crank calls without the language
barrier ;-)
Paul Boddie
>
> It can be made better and if that means add/removing letters or
> redefining what a letter represents i am fine with that. I know first
> hand the hypocrisy of the English language. I am thinking more on the
> lines of English redux!
Elsewhere in this thread you've written...
"This is another quirk of some languages that befuddles me. What is
with the ongoing language pronunciation tutorial some languages have
turned into -- French is a good example (*puke*). Do you *really* need
those squiggly lines and cues above letters so you won't forget how to
pronounce a word. Pure ridiculousness!"
And, in fact, there have been schemes to simplify written English such
as Initial Teaching Alphabet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
I imagine that this is the first time you've heard of it, though.
[...]
> We already live in a Orwellian language nightmare. Have you seen much
> change to the English language in your lifetime? i haven't.
Then you aren't paying attention. Especially in places where English
isn't the first language, there is a lot of modification of English
that is then considered an acceptable version of the language - this
is one way in which languages change.
Elsewhere, you wrote this...
"What makes you think that diversity is lost with a single language? I
say more pollination will occur and the seed will be more potent since
all parties will contribute to the same pool."
Parties are contributing to the same language already. It's just not
the only language that they contribute to.
From what you've written, I get the impression that you don't really
know any other languages, don't have much experience with non-native
users of your own language, are oblivious to how languages change, and
are oblivious to the existence of various attempts to "improve" the
English language in the past in ways similar to those you appear to
advocate, albeit incoherently: do you want to know how to pronounce a
word from its spelling or not?
Add to that a complete lack of appreciation for the relationship
between language and culture, along with a perverted application of
evolutionary models to such things, and you come across as a lazy
cultural supremacist who regards everyone else's language as
superfluous apart from his own. If you're just having problems with
UnicodeDecodeError, at least have the honesty to say so instead of
parading something not too short of bigotry in a public forum.
Paul
r
> On 30 Aug, 14:49, r <rt8...@gmail.com> wrote:
Then you aren't paying attention.
...(snip: defamation of character)
Hold the phone Paul you are calling me a retarded bigot and i don't
much appreciate that. I think you are completely misinterpreting my
post. i and i ask you read it again especially this part...
[quote]
BUT STOP!, before i go any further i want to respond to what i know
will be condemnation from the sociology nuts out there. Yes
multiculturalism is great, yes art is great, but if you can't see how
the ability to communicate is severely damperd by multi-languages
then
you only *feel* with your heart but you apparently have no ability to
reason with your mind intelligently.
[/quote]
I don't really care what language we adopt as long as we choose *only*
one and then seek to perfect it to perfection. And also that this
*one* language use simplicity as it's model. English sucks, but
compared to traditional Chinese and Egyptian Hieroglyphs it's a god
send.
I think a good language would combine the best of the popular world
languages into one super language for all. The same thing Python did
for programming. But of course programming is not as evolved as
natural language so we will need multiple programming languages for
quite some time...
And just as the internet enabled worldwide instant communication, the
unification of all languages will cause a Renaissance of sorts for
coloaboration which in turn will beget innovation of enormous
proportions. The ability to communicate unhampered is in everyones
best interest.
---------------------------------------
History Lesson and the laws of Nature
---------------------------------------
Look history is great but i am more concerned with the future. Learn
the lessons of the past, move on, and live for the future. If you want
to study the hair styles of Neanderthal women be my guest. Anybody
with half a brain knows the one world government and language is
coming. Why stop evolution, it is our destiny and it will improve the
human experience.
[Warning: facts of life ahead!!]
I'll bet you weep and moan for the native Americans who where
slaughtered don't you? Yes they suffered a tragic death as have many
poor souls throughout history and yes they also contributed to human
history and experience, but their time had come and they can only
blame themselfs for it. They stopped evolving, and when you stop
evolving you get left behind. We can't win wars with bows and arrows
in the 21st century, we can't fly to the moon on horse back, And you
damn sure can smoke a peace pipe and make all the bad things
disappear.
Nature can be cruel and unjust at times, but progress is absolute and
that is all mother nature (and myself to some extent) really cares
about. Without the survival of the fittest nothing you see, feel,
touch, or experience would be. The universe would collapse upon itself
and cease to exist. The system works because it is perfect. Don't
knock that which you do not understand, or, you refuse to understand..
We are but pawns in an ever evolving higher order entity. And when
this entity no longer has a use for us, we will be history...
Hendrik van Rooyen
> What makes you think that diversity is lost with a single language?
I am quite sure of this - it goes deeper than mere regional differences - your
first language forms the way you think - and if we all get taught the same
language, then on a very fundamental level we will all think in a similar
way, and that loss will outweigh the normal regional or cultural differences
on which you would have to rely for your diversity.
Philip Larkin has explained the effect better than I can:
"They f*ck you up, your mom and dad,
They do not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra, just for you."
> I
> say more pollination will occur and the seed will be more potent since
> all parties will contribute to the same pool.
I think this effect, while it might be real, would be swamped by the loss of
the real diversity.
> Sure there will be
> idioms of different regions but that is to be expected. But at least
> then i could make international crank calls without the language
> barrier ;-)
You can make crank calls _now_ without a language barrier - heavy breathing is
a universally understood idiom.
:-)
- Hendrik
r
anthropology crap has ever improved our day to day lives or moved use
into the future with great innovation? A life spend studying this
mumbo-jumbo is a complete waste of time when many other far more
important and *real* problems need solving!
To me this is nothing more than educated people going antiquing on a
Saturday afternoon! All they are going to find is more useless,
overpriced junk that clogs up the closets of society!
Nobody
> (I wish the HTML standards people would do the same. HTML 5
> should have been ASCII only (with the "&" escapes if desired)
> or Unicode. No "Latin-1", no upper code pages, no JIS, etc.)
IOW, you want the HTML standards to continue to be meaningless documents,
and "HTML" to continue to mean "what browsers support".
Because that would be the likely consequence of such a stance. Japanese
websites will continue to use Shift-JIS, Japanese cellphones (or
Scandanavian cellphones aimed at the Japanese market, for that matter)
will continue to render websites which use Shift-JIS, and HTML 5 will be
just as much a pure academic exercise as all of the other HTML standards.
Jan Kaliszewski
> a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get
> taught first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal
> experience that
> there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that
> takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity
> would be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination,
> and progress would slow or stop.
That's the point! Even in the case of programming languages we say about
'culture' and 'way of thinking' connected with each of them, though
after all they are only formal constructs.
In case of natural languages it's incomparably richer and more complex.
Each natural language has richness of culture and ages of history
-- behind that language and recorded in it in many ways.
Most probably such an unification would mean terrible impoverishment
of our (humans') culture and, as a result, terrible squandering of our
intelectual, emotional, cognitive etc. potential -- especially if such
unification were a result of intentional policy (and not of a slow and
'patient' process of synthesis).
*j
--
Jan Kaliszewski (zuo) <z...@chopin.edu.pl>
Paul Boddie
>
> Hold the phone Paul you are calling me a retarded bigot and i don't
> much appreciate that. I think you are completely misinterpreting my
> post. i and i ask you read it again especially this part...
I didn't call you a "retarded bigot", and yet I did read your post.
[...]
> I don't really care what language we adopt as long as we choose *only*
> one and then seek to perfect it to perfection. And also that this
> *one* language use simplicity as it's model. English sucks, but
> compared to traditional Chinese and Egyptian Hieroglyphs it's a god
> send.
You don't care which language it is as long as it's the one you use.
That's what this sounds like, layered on top of what you've already
written (and what you write below). How about Esperanto? You have
heard of Esperanto, right? Or take your pick from the other artificial
languages - they're relatively popular in some places where English
isn't the natural first-choice foreign language.
[...]
> Look history is great but i am more concerned with the future. Learn
> the lessons of the past, move on, and live for the future. If you want
> to study the hair styles of Neanderthal women be my guest. Anybody
> with half a brain knows the one world government and language is
> coming. Why stop evolution, it is our destiny and it will improve the
> human experience.
Again, we witness a distortion of scientific concepts through the use
of political themes.
> [Warning: facts of life ahead!!]
Even Xah Lee's harshest critics must acknowledge that Xah delivers a
less offensive, more entertaining rant than this. At least Xah has
mastered the art of the expletive.
> I'll bet you weep and moan for the native Americans who where
> slaughtered don't you? Yes they suffered a tragic death as have many
> poor souls throughout history and yes they also contributed to human
> history and experience, but their time had come and they can only
> blame themselfs for it.
You're on a slippery slope when you claim that people deserve whatever
mistreatment or misfortune comes their way through mere circumstances
of birth. I suggest you step back and actually read your messages
again and consider how others might interpret them.
I also suggest that, unless you really wish to discuss deficiencies of
Unicode with respect to Python, you don't use this list/group as a
discussion forum for your ill-informed notions of "progress", but
instead take them to a more appropriate forum where I'm sure people
will be happy to scrutinise your ideas at their leisure.
Paul
r
(snip)
> You don't care which language it is as long as it's the one you use.
> That's what this sounds like, layered on top of what you've already
> written (and what you write below).
I said it before and i will say it again. I DON"T CARE WHAT LANGUAGE
WE USE AS LONG AS IT IS A MODERN LANGUAGE FOUNDED ON IDEALS OF
SIMPLICITY!!!!
> How about Esperanto? You have
> heard of Esperanto, right? Or take your pick from the other artificial
> languages - they're relatively popular in some places where English
> isn't the natural first-choice foreign language.
English is by far already the de-facto lingua franca throughout the
world. However it has many shortcommings. The most prevalent being
idiotic pronunciation. You can thank neo-nazi-linguist and your third
grade language teachers for this brainwashing. Academias raping of
languages has been going on for centuries.
> > Look history is great but i am more concerned with the future. Learn
> > the lessons of the past, move on, and live for the future. If you want
> > to study the hair styles of Neanderthal women be my guest. Anybody
> > with half a brain knows the one world government and language is
> > coming. Why stop evolution, it is our destiny and it will improve the
> > human experience.
>
> Again, we witness a distortion of scientific concepts through the use
> of political themes.
You can deny the holocaust all you want but it still happened and so
too shall the great unity! Sadly because of cultural and social
fanatics like yourself, it will probably take another great war to
usher in the new order.
> Even Xah Lee's harshest critics must acknowledge that Xah delivers a
> less offensive, more entertaining rant than this. At least Xah has
> mastered the art of the expletive.
So you are advocating for me to use derogatory statements in my post,
no thanks i need not resort to adolescent rants to argue my points.
And why do you continue to compare me to XL. Has XL *ever* helped a
python user in this forum? I have, many times. I am *actually* a
python programmer who cares about Python and my posts bring much vigor
and intelligence to an otherwise boring NG -- like me or not.
> You're on a slippery slope when you claim that people deserve whatever
> mistreatment or misfortune comes their way through mere circumstances
> of birth. I suggest you step back and actually read your messages
> again and consider how others might interpret them.
Paul: civilizations rise and fall, this is beyond our control. Every
great power will utter fail at some point. Some die out like a slow
burning candle, others go quickly and painfully from defeating blows
in war time. This is an eventuality you must face friend. This whole
save the whales BS is really getting on my nerves! Stop trying to play
God Paul, it is not your decision when and where the blade shall
fall.
When a people stop evolving and no longer have anything productive to
give to evolution, evolution stamps them out. If the Indians had
developed gun power and industrialized America they might be running
more than merely a casino. Oh No! Was that out of line, you will
probably think so.
Stay in know and you shall endure...
r
(snip)
> Because that would be the likely consequence of such a stance. Japanese
> websites will continue to use Shift-JIS, Japanese cellphones (or
> Scandanavian cellphones aimed at the Japanese market, for that matter)
> will continue to render websites which use Shift-JIS, and HTML 5 will be
> just as much a pure academic exercise as all of the other HTML standards.
Yes and this keep-everyone-happy crap will go on for centuries.
Unicode will then turn into another elephant sized bloatware standard
that only VB and MSDN, M$ Office, and Adobe PDF can hold a candle to.
Who cares, hard drives can hold terabytes of useless junk, right?
This is starting to border on OCD tendencies and i for one am getting
very nervous.
Hendrik van Rooyen
> Rather elitist viewpoint... Why don't we just drop nukes on some 60%
> of populated landmasses that don't have a "western" culture and avoid
> the whole problem?
Now yer talking, boyo! It will surely help with the basic problem which is
the heavy infestation of people on the planet!
:-)
- Hendrik
Paul Boddie
>
> I said it before and i will say it again. I DON"T CARE WHAT LANGUAGE
> WE USE AS LONG AS IT IS A MODERN LANGUAGE FOUNDED ON IDEALS OF
> SIMPLICITY!!!!
[Esperanto]
> English is by far already the de-facto lingua franca throughout the
> world.
You don't care, but here it comes: English! And is it a language
"founded on ideals of simplicity"? I suggest you familiarise yourself
with the history of the English language.
[...]
> You can deny the holocaust all you want but it still happened and so
> too shall the great unity! Sadly because of cultural and social
> fanatics like yourself, it will probably take another great war to
> usher in the new order.
Now you are just being offensive.
[...]
> So you are advocating for me to use derogatory statements in my post,
> no thanks i need not resort to adolescent rants to argue my points.
So what was the bulk of your opening message in this thread or the
kind of gutter remarks made above if not "adolescent rants"?
> And why do you continue to compare me to XL. Has XL *ever* helped a
> python user in this forum? I have, many times. I am *actually* a
> python programmer who cares about Python and my posts bring much vigor
> and intelligence to an otherwise boring NG -- like me or not.
Whether you actually care about Python or not, I repeat my suggestion
that you take rants of this nature out of this forum and to a more
appropriate place. At the very time the community seeks to increase
diversity, such material is not only insensitive towards those who do
not share your own cultural and political background, it also
demonstrates a total lack of awareness of the kind of community people
are trying to build and sustain.
And don't give us the "livening up the newsgroup" excuse. The only
reason people use newsgroups like this for their political posturing
is analogous to a football player bursting into a chess club and
claiming superiority in his own sport over those whose pastime has
been interrupted: he knows that in a more suitable venue, his
inadequacy would quickly be revealed by active practitioners of the
discipline. Take your material elsewhere - maybe then the historians,
linguists and sociologists will give you the tuition you so richly
deserve!
Paul
Nigel Rantor
<bait>
On two conditions:
1) We drop some "test" bombs on Slough to satisfy Betjeman.
2) We strap both Xah and r to aforementioned bombs.
</bait>
<switch>
Also, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Esperanto yet. Sounds like
something r and Xah would *love*.
Slightly off-topic - does anyone have a good recipe for getting
thunderbird to kill whole threads for good? Either based on a rule or
just some extension I can use?
The Xah/r threads are like car crashes, I can't help but watch but my
time could be better spent and I don't want to unsub the whole list.
</switch>
Cheers,
n
Rami Chowdhury
but just FYI:
> Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also
> useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian
> languages.
Devanagari is what's used for Hindi and a handful of other languages, yes,
but most Indian languages (Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, and Tamil just to
name a few) use different scripts.
On Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:07:17 -0700, Neil Hodgson
<nyamatong...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Benjamin Peterson:
>
>> Like Sanskrit or Snowman language?
>
> Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also
> useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian
> languages.
>
> Not sure if you are referring to the ☃ snowman character or Arctic
> region languages like Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing like ᐲᐦᒑᔨᕽ
> which were added to Unicode 8 years after the initial version. I'd guess
> that was added from political rather than marketing motives. ☃ was
> required since it was present in Japanese character sets.
>
> Neil
--
Rami Chowdhury
"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity" --
Hanlon's Razor
408-597-7068 (US) / 07875-841-046 (UK) / 0189-245544 (BD)
Emile van Sebille
> On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:36:46 +0100, Nigel Rantor <wig...@wiggly.org>
<snip>
>> Also, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Esperanto yet. Sounds like
>> something r and Xah would *love*.
>>
Just curious -- has anyone mentioned autocoding? :)
Emile
Byung-Hee HWANG
Please do not insult Xah. He spoke nothing in this threads.
--
"After the divorce I gave Ginny and the kids more than the courts said I
should."
-- Johnny Fontane, "Chapter 1", page 36
r
Well despite all my rantings over Unicode i highly doubt Guido will
remove it from Python or any other language devs will follow suit. As
i pointed out the real issue is not so much a Unicode problem (which
is just a monkey patch) but stems from the multi-language problem.
I think a correlation can be drawn between the current state of the
world now, and the state of programming *pre* OOP. A lot of duplicate
natural languages are spread out every where like some noob's
spaghetti code. There is no intelligent all encompassing system to
reign in this unorganization.
We need an intelligent object model (universal language) to reign in
this madness. We must wrap up the loose ends here so we can spend
more time on real problems and less time on the remedial work of
duplicating code (leaning multi-lang's) and debugging code
(miscommunication and misunderstandings between multi-lang users).
How many countless years are wasted on humans learning multiple
languages just so we can communicate? How many advancements in
medicine, physics, mathematics, blah, are we pushing further down the
road due to wasted time and energy?
But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units
of measure, etc. Until this multiplicity is reigned in, programmers
will suffer the agony of Unicode. Travelers to foreign lands will need
to exchange their monies And yes, *even* mechanic's will need to carry
around a set of metric and standard wrenches in their toolboxes.
What a shame :-(
Terry Reedy
> Well despite all my rantings over Unicode i highly doubt Guido will
> remove it from Python or any other language devs will follow suit. As
> i pointed out the real issue is not so much a Unicode problem (which
> is just a monkey patch) but stems from the multi-language problem.
Unicode is a symptom, not a fundamental cause.
[snip]
> But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units
> of measure, etc.
There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the
only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An
interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system
in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English
as a common language.
tjr
Matthew Barnett
> Am 01.09.2009 um 09:39 schrieb Terry Reedy:
>
>>> But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units
>>> of measure, etc.
>
>> only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An
>> interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system
>> in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic
>> English as a common language.
>
> Three principal exceptions are Burma (Myanmar), Liberia, and the United
> States.
> The United Kingdom has officially adopted the International System of Units
> but not with the intention of replacing customary measures entirely.
>
The intention in the UK was to switch to SI over a period of 10 years,
starting in 1971, so from then only SI was taught in schools.
Earlier this year the EU decided that it wouldn't force the UK to
abandon the few remaining uses of the Imperial system; SI is preferred,
but Imperial is permitted. The roads are still Imperial, and milk
delivered to the door can still use the existing pint bottles, but milk
sold in shops is in SI.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> When I was a student, they told us, that in a couple of years there will be
> the SI-system only, because most countries accepted it in their laws.
> So we should adopt it.
> That was in the early 70ties.
> Only this year we have to deliver results of technical processes to british
> and US companies. They still want them in their "crazy outdated" units.
>
>
> The other thing would be the US to adopt a "simplified basic English".
> I would not be astonished, that british people would state,
> that they already do :-)
>
steve
although better sense tells me not to feed the troll -- I'll bite.
Mainly because, r, unlike XL does seem to offer help every one in a while.
So, ...
On 08/31/2009 03:58 AM, r wrote:
> On Aug 30, 2:05 pm, Paul Boddie<p...@boddie.org.uk> wrote: (snip)
>> You don't care which language it is as long as it's the one you use. That's
>> what this sounds like, layered on top of what you've already written (and
>> what you write below).
>
> I said it before and i will say it again. I DON"T CARE WHAT LANGUAGE WE USE
> AS LONG AS IT IS A MODERN LANGUAGE FOUNDED ON IDEALS OF SIMPLICITY!!!!
>
I think you are confusing simplicity with uniformity.
Uniformity is not always good. Sure standardizing on units of measure and
airline codes is good, but expecting everyone to speak one language is akin to
expecting everyone to wear one type of clothing or expecting everyone to drive
just one type of automobile -- those kind of rules works well in a small sets
where doing so fulfills a purpose (in the army, hospitals or taxi service, for
instance).
The problems associated with enforcing uniformity within larger sets are often
_less_ _simple_ than finding _solutions_ to deal with _complexity_ (your
misplaced philosophical rhetoric about how one-world-one-language-would-usher
in-a-golden-age aside -- /that/ you should take up with any person of science
and be ready to be laughed at).
To put it another way, it is better to create data structures to deal with
variable length names rather than mandating that everybody has names < 30 chars.
If you fail to understand how that applies to unicode, you sadly will have
trouble understanding the existence of not only unicode, but also of TCP/IP,
timezones, xml and the whole concept of Interfaces.
[...snip...]
> Paul: civilizations rise and fall, this is beyond our control. Every great
> power will utter fail at some point. Some die out like a slow burning candle,
> others go quickly and painfully from defeating blows in war time. This is an
> eventuality you must face friend. This whole save the whales BS is really
> getting on my nerves! Stop trying to play God Paul, it is not your decision
> when and where the blade shall fall.
>
> When a people stop evolving and no longer have anything productive to give to
> evolution, evolution stamps them out. If the Indians had developed gun power
> and industrialized America they might be running more than merely a casino.
> Oh No! Was that out of line, you will probably think so.
>
> Stay in know and you shall endure...
>
This might come as a bit of shock for you, but evolution awards those who are
capable of adapting to complexity rather then those who expect things to be
uniform. You, dear friend, and those who yearn for uniformity are the ones on
the path to extinction.
cheers,
- steve
--
random non tech spiel: http://lonetwin.blogspot.com/
tech randomness: http://lonehacks.blogspot.com/
what i'm stumbling into: http://lonetwin.stumbleupon.com/
Rami Chowdhury
> but Imperial is permitted.
IME most people in the UK under the age of 40 can speak SI without trouble.
On the other hand, "let's nip down to the pub for 580ml of beer" just
doesn't have the right ring to it ;-)
On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:17:00 -0700, Matthew Barnett
<mraba...@mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
> Kurt Mueller wrote:
>> Am 01.09.2009 um 09:39 schrieb Terry Reedy:
>>
>>>> But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units
>>>> of measure, etc.
>>
--
Hyuga
> On Aug 30, 8:46 am, r <rt8...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of
> > characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language. Why do we
> > need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages
> > have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of Chinese
> > language.
>
> The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite
> capable of expression in ASCII ("r tongzhi shi sha gua") and doesn't
> have those pesky it's/its problems.
>
> > The A-Z char set is flawless!
>
> ... for expressing the sounds of a very limited number of languages,
> and English is *NOT* one of those.
I'd say don't feel the troll, but too late for that I guess. I just
wanted to add, in defense of the Chinese written language (in case
this hasn't already been added--I'm probably not going to bother
reading this entire thread) that I think it would make a fairly good
candidate for use at least as a universal *written* language.
Particularly simplified Chinese since, well, it's simpler.
The advantages are that the grammar is relatively simple, and it can
be used to illustrate concepts independently of the writer's spoken
language. Sure it's tied somewhat to the Chinese language, but it can
certainly be mapped more easily to any other language than
phonetically-based written language.
r
(snip)
> There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the
> only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An
> interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system
> in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English
> as a common language.
Bring on the metric system Terry, i have been waiting all my life!!
Now, if we can only convince those 800 million Mandarin Chinese
speakers... *ahem* Do we have a Chinese translator in the house?
:-)
r
(snip)
> I think you are confusing simplicity with uniformity.
>
> Uniformity is not always good. Sure standardizing on units of measure and
> airline codes is good, but expecting everyone to speak one language is akin to
> expecting everyone to wear one type of clothing or expecting everyone to drive
> just one type of automobile -- those kind of rules works well in a small sets
> where doing so fulfills a purpose (in the army, hospitals or taxi service, for
> instance).
Thanks for bringing good arguments to this thread. But let me argue
your talking points a bit.
You seem to think that a single language somehow infringes upon the
freedoms of individuals and you argue this by making parallels to
personal taste's like like cars, clothing, hairstyles, etc. I am an
American so i deeply believe in the right of individuals to freedom of
speech, freedom of expression. Freedom of everything AS long as your
freedoms don't cancel-out others freedoms.
I am also not advocating the outlawing or "frowning upon" of any non-
official language, quite the contrary. I AM saying that there must be
*ONE* language that is taught in schools throughout the world as the
very first language a child and *ONE* language that is used for
official business of governments and corporations throughout the
world. HOWEVER, individuals will still have the freedom to speak/write/
curse in any other language their heart desires. But with the great
language unity, all peoples will be able to communicate fluently
through the universal language while keeping their cultural identity.
Can you not see the beauty in this system?
Like i said, i believe in individual freedom, but you and i are also
children of the Human race. There are some responsibilities we must
keep to Human-kind as a whole. Universal communication is one of them.
Universal freedom is another. An neither of these responsibilities
will hold back individualism.
> To put it another way, it is better to create data structures to deal with
> variable length names rather than mandating that everybody has names < 30 chars.
You need to understand that language is for communication and
expression of ideas, and that is it. It is really not as glamorous as
you make it seem. It is simple a utility and nothing more...
> This might come as a bit of shock for you, but evolution awards those who are
> capable of adapting to complexity rather then those who expect things to be
> uniform. You, dear friend, and those who yearn for uniformity are the ones on
> the path to extinction.
No evolution awards those that benefit evolution. You make it seem as
evolution is some loving mother hen, quite the contrary! Evolution is
selfish, greedy, and sometimes evil. And it will endure all of us...
remember the old cliche "Nice guys finish last"?
Terry Reedy
> On Sep 1, 2:39 am, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote:
> (snip)
>> There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the
>> only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An
>> interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system
>> in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English
>> as a common language.
as a common *second* language.
> Bring on the metric system Terry, i have been waiting all my life!!
>
> Now, if we can only convince those 800 million Mandarin Chinese
> speakers... *ahem* Do we have a Chinese translator in the house?
They already pretty much are convinced as regards to English as a second
language, which is what I meant.
r
(snip)
> I'd say don't feel the troll, but too late for that I guess.
The only trolls in this thread are you and the others who breaks into
MY THREAD just for the knee-jerk reaction of troll calling! Even
though you *did* offer some argument to one of the subjects of this
thread, it was cancelled out by your trolling!
Please come back when you have some constructive thoughts on the
subjects of Python as it relates to Unicode, or Universal natural
languages. Whether you want to admit it or not these subjects affect
programming and Python.
And here is the definition of a troll for the uneducated among us, of
which it seems is surprising a very large number these days...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)
Rami Chowdhury
> MY THREAD just for the knee-jerk reaction of troll calling!
How does this make one's opinion any less relevant? I think the fact that
you are coming across in this thread as closed-minded, bigoted, and
uninformed gives everyone plenty of right to accuse you of trolling. Being
aggressive about it doesn't help.
Yes, Unicode is a hack, but it's a hack necessitated by the prevalence
(and naivete) of ASCII. If you're advocating something as absurd as
standardizing on a universal, simple language, how about an almost equally
ridiculous proposal: why don't we break backwards-compatibility with ASCII?
Steven D'Aprano
>> SI is preferred,
>> but Imperial is permitted.
>
> IME most people in the UK under the age of 40 can speak SI without
> trouble.
>
> On the other hand, "let's nip down to the pub for 580ml of beer" just
> doesn't have the right ring to it ;-)
Oh those wacky Brits and their obsession with precision -- why do they
have to specify the volume of beer? What's wrong with any of these?
Let's nip down to the pub for a beer.
Let's nip down to the pub for a couple of drinks.
Let's nip down to the pub -- good for drinkers who prefer a brandy.
Let's go get hammered! -- what they're really thinking.
--
Steven
r
(snip: trolling tirade)
I don't think when i started this thread i had any intentions what-so-
ever of pleasing asinine-anthropologist, sociology-sickos, or neo-nazi-
linguist. No, actually i am quite sure of that is the case!
Rami Chowdhury
> [snip: variety of almost-alliterative epithets]
Well, if you admit you set out to offend people, then you're trolling.
Gabriel Genellina
> On Sep 1, 1:52�pm, Hyuga <hyugaricd...@gmail.com> wrote:
> (snip)
>> I'd say don't feel the troll, but too late for that I guess. �
>
> The only trolls in this thread are you and the others who breaks into
> MY THREAD just for the knee-jerk reaction of troll calling! Even
> though you *did* offer some argument to one of the subjects of this
> thread, it was cancelled out by your trolling!
Bueno, voy a escribir en el segundo lenguaje m�s hablado en el mundo
(espa�ol), despu�s del mandar�n (con m�s de 1000 millones de personas). El
ingl�s est� reci�n en el tercer puesto, con menos de la mitad de hablantes
(500 millones).
Si no me entend�s, jodete.
Fuente: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=languages+in+the+world
--
Gabriel Genellina
Hendrik van Rooyen
> En Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:49:57 -0300, r <rt8...@gmail.com> escribió:
> > On Sep 1, 1:52 pm, Hyuga <hyugaricd...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > (snip)
> >
> >> I'd say don't feel the troll, but too late for that I guess.
> >
> > The only trolls in this thread are you and the others who breaks into
> > MY THREAD just for the knee-jerk reaction of troll calling! Even
> > though you *did* offer some argument to one of the subjects of this
> > thread, it was cancelled out by your trolling!
>
> (español), después del mandarín (con más de 1000 millones de personas). El
> inglés está recién en el tercer puesto, con menos de la mitad de hablantes
> (500 millones).
>
> Si no me entendés, jodete.
>
> Fuente: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=languages+in+the+world
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? - trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? - bilingual.
What do you call someone who only speaks one language?
- A stupid gringo!
Nice one Gabriel - and with a link too!
Looks like I am going to have to learn some Castilian, or something.
:-)
- Hendrik
Steven D'Aprano
posts. Oh my! They say a little learning is a dangerous thing, and this
is a great example -- the only think bigger than r's ignorance and
naivety on these topics is his confidence that he alone understands The
Truth. Oh well, we were all kiddies like that once, so absolutely sure of
ourselves on the basis of the most shallow paddling around on the shore
of the sea of knowledge.
I will limit myself to commenting on only one thing. (A good thing too,
because this is long enough as it is.)
On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:39:43 -0700, r wrote, quoting Steve (no relation
<st...@lonetwin.net>:
>> This might come as a bit of shock for you, but evolution awards those
>> who are capable of adapting to complexity rather then those who expect
>> things to be uniform. You, dear friend, and those who yearn for
>> uniformity are the ones on the path to extinction.
>
> No evolution awards those that benefit evolution. You make it seem as
> evolution is some loving mother hen, quite the contrary! Evolution is
> selfish, greedy, and sometimes evil. And it will endure all of us...
>
> remember the old cliche "Nice guys finish last"?
This is Not Even Wrong. Evolution isn't a *thing*, it is a *process*.
Nothing exists to "benefit evolution", that's like saying that horses
have long legs to "benefit running" or people have lungs to "benefit
breathing". Horses have long legs so *they* can run, which is beneficial
to *them* (but not earthworms, oak trees, eagles or sharks) because it
enables them, indirectly, to survive long enough to produce offspring
which are more likely to survive than they otherwise would be. Horses
aren't the mechanism for running to make more running. Running is one of
the ways horses survive long enough to make more horses.
"R" is utterly confused if he thinks species live or die according to
because they're benefiting evolution. Species live or die according to
whether or not they reproduce, not due to services rendered to a process.
Suggesting that species exist for the benefit of evolution is backwards
-- it is like saying that we have computers and light bulbs and
televisions and DVD players so that electricity can run through wires. Or
that we build cars for the benefit of combustion.
(This sort of nonsense, anthropomorphizing the process of evolution,
seems to be unique to those on the right-wing of politics. Go figure.)
Steve (the other Steve) is right -- species which are incapable of
dealing with the complexity and dynamism of the world are doomed to
extinction. Biologists have a word for stasis: "dead". The most vigorous,
lively ecosystems are those that are complex, like rain forests (what
used to be called "jungles" when I was a lad), coral reefs and mangroves.
Messy, complicated, complex ecosystems are successful because they are
resilient to damage -- a plague comes along and even if it kills off
every individual of one species of fruit, there are a thousand different
species unharmed.
The sort of monoculture which "r" sings the praises of are fragile and
brittle. Look at the Cavendish banana, nearly extinct because a disease
is wiping the plants out, and there's not enough genetic variability in
it to survive. (Fortunately there are dozens of varieties of bananas, so
when the Cavendish becomes extinct, we'll still have bananas.)
Or the Irish Potato Famine: millions of Irish dead from famine because
90% of their food intake came from a *single* source, potatoes, which in
turn came from not just a single variety but just a handful of closely
related individuals.
(Well, also because the English were brutish thugs during the famine too,
but that's just politics.)
As for the idea "nice guys finish last", that's a ridiculous over-
simplification. Vampire bats share their food with other vampire bats who
otherwise would be hungry. Remoras stick to sharks, who carry them around
for years without eating them. There's those little birds which climb
into the mouths of crocodiles to clean their teeth while the crocodile
sits patiently with it's mouth wide open. Wolves and wild dogs and hyenas
hunt cooperatively. Baboons and chimpanzees form alliances. Penguins
huddle together through the freezing months of darkness, and although the
winds are so cold that the penguins on the outside would freeze to death,
few of them do, because they all take their share of time in the centre.
Monkeys cry out warnings when they see a leopard or a hawk, even though
it puts them personally at risk. Meercats post sentries, who expose
themselves to danger to protect the rest of the colony.
And the most successful mammal on the planet, more successful than any
other large animal, is also the most cooperative, least selfish species
around. It is so unselfish, so cooperative, that individuals will rush
into burning buildings to save complete strangers, and that cooperation
has let the species colonize the entire planet and even send a few
individuals, risking life and limb, to the Moon.
--
Steven
Gabriel Genellina
<hen...@microcorp.co.za> escribi�:
> On Wednesday 02 September 2009 08:52:55 Gabriel Genellina wrote:
>> Bueno, voy a escribir en el segundo lenguaje m�s hablado en el mundo
>> (espa�ol), despu�s del mandar�n (con m�s de 1000 millones de personas).
>
> What do you call someone who speaks three languages? - trilingual.
>
> What do you call someone who speaks two languages? - bilingual.
>
> What do you call someone who only speaks one language?
> - A stupid gringo!
LOL!
> Nice one Gabriel - and with a link too!
> Looks like I am going to have to learn some Castilian, or something.
> :-)
Looks like we all will have to learn mandarin! A nice language but with a
high entrance barrier for western people.
--
Gabriel Genellina
Martin P. Hellwig
<cut very good reasoning>
I'd like to add the following:
It is an intriguing human trade to attribute emotions and reasons to
things that have none. Intriguing because I haven't observed yet that it
provides an advantage, but it happens so often that I can't exclude it
either.
I find that evolution makes more sense _to_me_ if I see it in the
following perspective:
If something can happen, it will happen, if there is a higher chance
something can happen more often, then it will happen more often, though
not necessaryly at the time the observer expects it
--
MPH
http://blog.dcuktec.com
'If consumed, best digested with added seasoning to own preference.'
Mel
> Looks like we all will have to learn mandarin! A nice language but with a
> high entrance barrier for western people.
It will pay off in the long run. Problem for me: it seems most people in
Toronto speak Cantonese. That's just something I'll have to deal with.
Wrote a little 3-in-a-row game to get familiar with Chinese characters.
Astonished at how Chinese-ready Python 2.5 already is. Collecting characters
from web sites and pasting them in to literals in the program source just
works.
Mel.
r
<ste...@REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au> wrote:
(snip)
> > No evolution awards those that benefit evolution. You make it seem as
> > evolution is some loving mother hen, quite the contrary! Evolution is
> > selfish, greedy, and sometimes evil. And it will endure all of us...
>
> > remember the old cliche "Nice guys finish last"?
>
> This is Not Even Wrong. Evolution isn't a *thing*, it is a *process*.
> Nothing exists to "benefit evolution", that's like saying that horses
> have long legs to "benefit running" or people have lungs to "benefit
> breathing".
Well horses do have long and well evolved legs for running and humans
lungs for breathing, and they have them because it benefits them which
in turn benefits evolution. the buck stops with evolution.
> "R" is utterly confused if he thinks species live or die according to
> because they're benefiting evolution. Species live or die according to
> whether or not they reproduce,
Dear God i hate the current "progress" of evolution if reproduction
guaranteed survival. I think it is just a "wee" bit more complicated
than that Steven. *wink*
> (This sort of nonsense, anthropomorphizing the process of evolution,
> seems to be unique to those on the right-wing of politics. Go figure.)
Uh? let's not go there. Leave politics corrupting influence out of
this.
> Steve (the other Steve) is right -- species which are incapable of
> dealing with the complexity and dynamism of the world are doomed to
> extinction. Biologists have a word for stasis: "dead". The most vigorous,
> lively ecosystems are those that are complex, like rain forests (what
> used to be called "jungles" when I was a lad), coral reefs and mangroves.
> Messy, complicated, complex ecosystems are successful because they are
> resilient to damage -- a plague comes along and even if it kills off
> every individual of one species of fruit, there are a thousand different
> species unharmed.
>
> The sort of monoculture which "r" sings the praises of are fragile and
> brittle. Look at the Cavendish banana, nearly extinct because a disease
> is wiping the plants out, and there's not enough genetic variability in
> it to survive. (Fortunately there are dozens of varieties of bananas, so
> when the Cavendish becomes extinct, we'll still have bananas.)
You cannot draw parallels between bio diversity and language
diversity. Bio diversity is fundamental to all species survival, even
a virus. I am quite sure that the adoption of Universal World language
will not usher in the apocalypse for human kind, quite the contrary!
Ok a Jew, a Catholic Priest and a Chinese man walk into a bar.... Now
if the bar suddenly catches fire and only one of them notices, how
should this person convey the danger to the others. Well he could jump-
up-and-down-yelling-oh!-oh!-oh!-with-arms-failing-in-the-air, but i
think human evolution has presented a far more elegant way to
communicate than that of the chimpanzee.
> Or the Irish Potato Famine: millions of Irish dead from famine because
> 90% of their food intake came from a *single* source, potatoes, which in
> turn came from not just a single variety but just a handful of closely
> related individuals.
OMG! human kind will be utterly wiped out by the universal language.
Somebody please jump-up-and-down-with-flailing-arms we must warn
everyone of this impending doom before it is too late! </chicken
little>
(snip: more political innuendo)
> As for the idea "nice guys finish last", that's a ridiculous over-
> simplification. Vampire bats share their food with other vampire bats who
> otherwise would be hungry.
...could be they are fatting them up for the kill!
> Remoras stick to sharks, who carry them around
> for years without eating them.
...Well yes sharks share a personality trait with cab drivers but...?
And i wonder if they really *know* they are back there? Sharks aren't
exactly evolutions shining jewel.
> There's those little birds which climb
> into the mouths of crocodiles to clean their teeth while the crocodile
> sits patiently with it's mouth wide open.
...Hmm, i have thought about clamping down hard while my dentist pokes
around with his fingers in there. But who then would clean my teeth?
And it could be that those crocs are just slightly vain?
> Wolves and wild dogs and hyenas
> hunt cooperatively. Baboons and chimpanzees form alliances. Penguins
> huddle together through the freezing months of darkness, and although the
> winds are so cold that the penguins on the outside would freeze to death,
> few of them do, because they all take their share of time in the centre.
...birds of a feather flock together!
> Monkeys cry out warnings when they see a leopard or a hawk, even though
> it puts them personally at risk. Meercats post sentries, who expose
> themselves to danger to protect the rest of the colony.
...they could be expendable to the community!
> And the most successful mammal on the planet, more successful than any
> other large animal, is also the most cooperative, least selfish species
> around. It is so unselfish, so cooperative, that individuals will rush
> into burning buildings to save complete strangers
I always found it a funny (but sad irony) of human our "supposedly"
advanced civilization when public warning systems must be read in
multiple languages. I guess the best you can hope for is that yours
will be the read first. ;-)
How do say... "BREAKING NEWS!: There has been a deadly cloud of gas
released from a nearby chem plant, Currently the winds are moving
south-south-west at 10 miles per hour. If you are in the downwind path
of this cloud, move cross wind and up wind immediately or die!"....in
all the languages of the world?
"""Oh evolution thou art very old and wise, save us from the polluting
corruption of stupidity, save us now!"""
I'd like to present a bug report to evolution, obviously the garbage
collector is malfunctioning.
Nigel Rantor
> I'd like to present a bug report to evolution, obviously the garbage
> collector is malfunctioning.
I think most people think that when they read the drivel that you generate.
I'm done with your threads and posts.
*plonk*
Chris Jones
[..]
> Bring on the metric system Terry, i have been waiting all my life!!
>
> Now, if we can only convince those 800 million Mandarin Chinese
> speakers... *ahem* Do we have a Chinese translator in the house?
>
> :-)
"Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow"
And further on..
"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
The very worst about you rant is that you may be the harbinger, a sign
of things to come.
A loud steady voice told him that "By this as your standard, you will
conquer".
'nuff said.. have a good night.
CJ
Jan Claeys
> I said it before and i will say it again. I DON"T CARE WHAT LANGUAGE WE
> USE AS LONG AS IT IS A MODERN LANGUAGE FOUNDED ON IDEALS OF
> SIMPLICITY!!!!
Maybe we should use a language that has a Turing-complete grammar, so
that even computers can understand & speak it "easily"?
http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Panini:scholar.htm
(with thanks to Anna Ravenscroft for pointing me to this some time ago)
When used by everyone, it would allow us to write programs in the
language all of us speak... *Maybe*... :P
--
JanC
r
> Maybe we should use a language that has a Turing-complete grammar, so
> that even computers can understand & speak it "easily"?
Interesting, i do find some things more easily explainable using code,
however, code losses the ability to describe abstract ideas and such.
But you have piqued my interest...?
--
def get_enlightened():
import webbrowser
webbrowser.open('http://jjsenlightenments.blogspot.com/')
Christopher Culver
> I just wanted to add, in defense of the Chinese written language
> least as a universal *written* language. Particularly simplified
> Chinese since, well, it's simpler.
>
> The advantages are that the grammar is relatively simple, and it can
> be used to illustrate concepts independently of the writer's spoken
> language.
Musings about the universality of the Chinese writing system, once so
common among Western thinkers, nevertheless do not square with
reality. The Chinese writing system is in fact deeply linked to the
Chinese language, even to the specific dialect being spoken. See
Defrancis' _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_ (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1984):
Robin Becker
.......
>
> What makes you think that diversity is lost with a single language? I
> say more pollination will occur and the seed will be more potent since
> all parties will contribute to the same pool. Sure there will be
> idioms of different regions but that is to be expected. But at least
> then i could make international crank calls without the language
> barrier ;-)
well allegedly, "the medium is the message" so we also need to take account of
language in addition to the meaning of communications. I don't believe all
languages are equivalent in the meanings that they can encode or convey. Our
mathematics is heavily biassed towards continuous differential systems and as a
result we end up with many physical theories that have smooth equilibrium
descriptions, we may literally be unable to get at other theories of the
physical world because our languages fall short.
--
Robin Becker
Christopher Culver
> well allegedly, "the medium is the message" so we also need to take
> account of language in addition to the meaning of communications. I
> don't believe all languages are equivalent in the meanings that they
> can encode or convey. Our mathematics is heavily biassed towards
> continuous differential systems and as a result we end up with many
> physical theories that have smooth equilibrium descriptions, we may
> literally be unable to get at other theories of the physical world
> because our languages fall short.
This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among
linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain
human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of
expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient
lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution.
ru...@yahoo.com
Fashion changes in science as well as clothes. :-) I wouldn't count
Sapir-Whorf out yet...
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html
Mel
> This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among
> linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain
> human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of
> expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient
> lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution.
Worf was raised as a Klingon, so you can expect this. If he'd been brought
up speaking Minbari, points 1 and 2 would have been obvious to him.
Mel.
Processor-Dev1l
> On Aug 29, 11:05 pm, Anny Mous <b1540...@tyldd.com> wrote:
> (snip)
>
> > How do we distinguish resume from résumé without accents?
>
> This is another quirk of some languages that befuddles me. What is
> with the ongoing language pronunciation tutorial some languages have
> turned into -- French is a good example (*puke*). Do you *really* need
> those squiggly lines and cues above letters so you won't forget how to
> pronounce a word. Pure ridiculousness!
>
> > Even when we succeed in banning all languages that can't be written using
> > A-Z, what do we do about the vast number of legacy documents? How do we
> > write about obsolete English letters like Ð and Þ without Unicode?
>
> Who gives a fig about obsolete languages, thank god they are dead and
> let's move on!!
>
>
>
> > > Some may say well how can we possibly force countries/people to speak/
> > > code in a uniform manner? Well that's simple, you just stop supporting
> > > their cryptic languages by dumping Unicode and returning to the
> > > beautiful ASCII and adopting English as the universal world language.
> > > Why English? Well because it is so widely spoken.
>
> > World population: 6.7 billion
>
> > Number of native Mandarin speakers: 873 million
> > Number of native Hindi speakers: 370 million
> > Number of native Spanish speakers: 350 million
> > Number of native English speakers: 340 million
>
> > Total number of Mandarin speakers: 1051 million
> > Total number of English speakers: 510 million
>
> >http://www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm
>
> I was actually referring to countries where the majority of people
> *actually* know what a computer is and how to use it... If there
> culture has not caught up with western technology yet they are doomed
> to the fate of native American Indians.
>
> > Whichever way you look at it, we should all convert to Mandarin, not
> > English. Looks like we still need Unicode.
>
> see my last comment
>
> (snip entertaining assumptions)
>
> > Yes, because language differences have utterly destroyed us so many times in
> > the past!
>
> > Have you thought about the difference between China, with one culture and
> > one spoken language for thousands of years, and Europe, with dozens of
> > competing cultures, competing governments, and alternate languages for just
> > as long? If multiple languages are so harmful, why was it the British,
> > French, Japanese, Russians, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians and
> > Americans who were occupying China during the Opium Wars and the Boxer
> > Rebellion, instead of the other way around?
>
> > Strength comes from diversity, not monoculture.
>
> No strength comes from superior firepower. The Chinese culture stop
> evolving thousands of years ago. Who invented gun powder? Yes the
> Chinese and all they could do with it was create fireworks. Europeans
> took gun powered and started a revolution that changes the world
> forever -- for better and for worse, but that is how advancements
> work. It wasn't until western influence came along and finally nudged
> china into the 21st century. Europeans seek out technology and aren't
> dragged down by an antiquated culture which is good for innovation. If
> China with it's huge population thought like a European, they would
> rule the earth for 10,000 years.
Well, I am from one of the non-English speaking countries (Czech
Republic). We were always messed up with windows-1250 or iso-8859-2.
Unicode is really great thing for us and for our developers.
About the "western" technology made in China and Taiwan... do you
really think US are so modern? I can only recommend you to visit
Japan :).
I also think 26 letters are really limited and English is one of the
most limited languages ever. It has too strict syntax. Yeah, it is
easy to learn, but not so cool to hear every day.
Btw how many foreign languages do you speak?
Christopher Culver
> Fashion changes in science as well as clothes. :-)
A favourite line of crackpots who think that their ridiculous position
is not held by others merely because of "fashion".
> I wouldn't count
> Sapir-Whorf out yet...
> http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html
That researcher does not say that language *constrains* thought, which
was the assertion of the OP and of the strict form of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis. She merely says that it may influence thought.
Robin Becker
very nice link, thanks.
--
Robin Becker
r
(snip)
> well allegedly, "the medium is the message" so we also need to take account of
> language in addition to the meaning of communications. I don't believe all
> languages are equivalent in the meanings that they can encode or convey. Our
> mathematics is heavily biassed towards continuous differential systems and as a
> result we end up with many physical theories that have smooth equilibrium
> descriptions, we may literally be unable to get at other theories of the
> physical world because our languages fall short.
> --
> Robin Becker
Intelligence does not depend on outside resources (languages),
intelligence begets new intelligent resources!
r
(snip)
> Worf was raised as a Klingon, so you can expect this. If he'd been brought
> up speaking Minbari, points 1 and 2 would have been obvious to him.
>
> Mel.
Yes Klingon's are a product of their moronic society, not their
moronic language. The brainwashing starts at home!
r
(snip)
> Well, I am from one of the non-English speaking countries (Czech
> Republic). We were always messed up with windows-1250 or iso-8859-2.
> Unicode is really great thing for us and for our developers.
Yes you need the crutch of Unicode because no all-encompassing-
language exists today. Because of this we need interpretors at
accident scenes, and subtitles on movies. Public Warning Systems must
be delayed due to repeating the same information in different
languages. And the worst part of all of this is the human instinct to
fear that which is different. Yes, multi-languages contribute to
racism and classism although are not the only cause. What moronicity
is this when a self-aware species has evolved for as long as we and
yet, has not perfected universal communication, sad, very sad! What
would an advanced civilization think if they dropped in for a spot of
tea?
> About the "western" technology made in China and Taiwan... do you
> really think US are so modern? I can only recommend you to visit
> Japan :).
The US is nearing the end of it's global reign and superpower status.
Is that a good or bad thing? Only time shall tell! Doesn't matter
really because some other power will step in and be the hated one,
it's very lonely at the top -- i myself know this fact all to well ;-)
> I also think 26 letters are really limited and English is one of the
> most limited languages ever. It has too strict syntax. Yeah, it is
> easy to learn, but not so cool to hear every day.
So how many letters do we need? 50, 100, 1000? Simplisticity is
elegance, that is why Python is so beautiful! Yes, English sucks eggs
and if we do adopt it as universal language, it should get an enema
for sure. But i am all for scraping the English language all together
and creating something completely new.
> Btw how many foreign languages do you speak?
I guess you judge intelligence from memorization of redundant facts?
Some people believe this, however i don't. I have gb's and gb's on my
hard drive for storing redundant facts. I use my mind for dreaming,
reasoning, contemplating, exploring, etc, not as a refuse bin! As i
said before language is nothing more than a utility, a way to
communicate with others. You can romanticize it all you want but at
the end of the day it is nothing more than what it is. People who
romanticize language typically like Shakespeare and such. I have no
interest in flower sniffing pansies from days gone by. My interest are
science, technology, and the advancement of human intelligence. I
leave Saturday morning cartoons for children.
r
<crcul...@christopherculver.com> wrote:
(snip)
> That researcher does not say that language *constrains* thought, which
> was the assertion of the OP and of the strict form of the Sapir-Whorf
> hypothesis. She merely says that it may influence thought.
*I* am the OP! I never said language constrained thought or
intelligence, that's lunacy! That would be akin to saying class status
decides intelligence! You should reread this thread immediately! My
argument is multi-languages and the loss of communication, and
obviously we have before us an example of this miss-communication.
Terry Reedy
>
> So how many letters do we need? 50, 100, 1000?
From Wikipedia IPA article:
Occasionally symbols are added, removed, or modified by the
International Phonetic Association. As of 2008, there are 107 distinct
letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosody marks in the IPA proper.
r
HaHa! and here is my favorite paragraph from that article..
The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that
are distinctive in spoken language: phonemes, intonation, and the
separation of words and syllables.[1] To represent additional
qualities of speech such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made
with a cleft palate, an extended set of symbols called the Extensions
to the IPA is used.[2]
LOL! (a smilie just would not have sufficed!)
Rhodri James
> r wrote:
>
>> So how many letters do we need? 50, 100, 1000?
>
> From Wikipedia IPA article:
> Occasionally symbols are added, removed, or modified by the
> International Phonetic Association. As of 2008, there are 107 distinct
> letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosody marks in the IPA proper.
The biggest problem for the IPA is that vowels are a two-dimensional
continuum, which is hard to map with discrete symbols. Worse, differing
vowel sounds are the big variable in regional accents. There's basically
too much variation within the dialectal family of English to make an
attempt to render it phonetically much use.
--
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeest Herder to the Masses
Hendrik van Rooyen
> This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among
> linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain
> human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of
> expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient
> lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution.
1) Is an assumption, not a proven fact. "falling out of favour" is merely
fashion amongst people who are dabbling in fuzzy areas where the hard
discipline of the "scientific method" is inapplicable, because it is kind of
hard to "prove" or "disprove" that my thinking and yours differ "because" my
first language is different to yours. - we end up talking about our beliefs,
after telling war stories.
2) Is about as useful as stating that any Turing complete language and
processor pair is capable of solving any computable problem, given enough
time.
So why are we not all programming in brainfuck?
Or speaking the language of the people who wrote linear B?
When a language lacks a word for a concept like "window", then (I
believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a
person will do, growing up with only that language.
- Hendrik
Christopher Culver
> 2) Is about as useful as stating that any Turing complete language and
> processor pair is capable of solving any computable problem, given enough
> time. So why are we not all programming in brainfuck?
Except the amount of circumlocution one language might happen to use
over another is quite limited.
> Or speaking the language of the people who wrote linear B?
You mean Mycenaean Greek? There's still a few million people in Europe
who speak a descendent of that very language.
> When a language lacks a word for a concept like "window", then (I
> believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a
> person will do, growing up with only that language.
"Window" goes back to an Anglo-Saxon compound "windeye". Even if a
word does not already exist in a given language for whatever novel
item, the language is capable of creating from its own resources.
Hyuga
<crcul...@christopherculver.com> wrote:
Oh, certainly! I thought I said as much in my original post, but maybe
I didn't stress that enough. I'm a lot stronger in Japanese than I am
in Chinese, but even Japanese uses various Chinese characters in ways
that have deep cultural ties that may not translate well (and in many
cases that are completely different from those characters'
implications in any Chinese language). I guess the reason I didn't
stress that enough is that I'm in no way implying that they be used as
is. I just think they could be taken as the basis for a standardized
universal written language. One might argue that it would make more
sense to come up with a new character set for that, but here we have
one that so many people are already familiar with in some form or
another. And the radical system makes them much easier to remember
than many people realize.
r
wrote:
(snip)
> When a language lacks a word for a concept like "window", then (I
> believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a
> person will do, growing up with only that language.
Are you telling us people using a language that does not have a word
for window somehow cannot comprehend what a window is, are you mad
man? Words are simply text attributes attached to objects. the text
attribute doesn't change the object in any way. just think of is
__repr__
Terry Reedy
This is the old Lenneberg-Chomsky Universalist hypothesis, which has
fallen out of favor among cognitive scientists and others as various
researchers have done actual experiments to determine how and when
language does and does not influence perception and thought. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Lie Ryan
Without an outsider (read: someone who used a different language) who
pointed out the idea of window; it is impossible for that person to
think about the concept of window except in the cases of independent
reinvention. This is because people are naturally lazy to think about
difficult concepts; "an opening on a plane" is much more difficult to
comprehend and express compared to "window". Thus people either have to
coin a new word for the complex concept or they won't be able to develop
the concept since they don't benefit from the abstraction that the new
word gives (think black-box thinking).
I would say "a word" is like a new class. A class encapsulates a
difficult concept into a much simpler wrapper so we don't have to think
about how it is implementated. New concepts and ideas will be developed
on top of these classes. Without the abstraction, we would have to use
much elaboration to express the more complex concept; and we will fail
to form conclusion earlier.
And this brings out the point: "though it is possible for any language
to illustrate any concept; the concept will require much less brain
cycle to comprehend in a fuller and richer language due to the wider
availability of abstractions".
"Yes it is possible" "But no, it is not feasible for any mere to think about
Lie Ryan
>
>> Not that I agree that it would be a Utopia, whatever the language - more like
>> a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught
>> first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal experience that
>> there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that
>> takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity would
>> be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and
>> progress would slow or stop.
>
> We already live in a Orwellian language nightmare. Have you seen much
> change to the English language in your lifetime? i haven't. A language
> must constantly evolve and trim the excess cruft that pollutes it. And
> English has a mountain of cruft! After all our years on this planet i
> think it's high time to perfect a simplified language for world-wide
> usage.
/LOL/, /GTFW/. After /googling/ on /the web/ for some time, /AFAICT/
English still accumulates words such as /"wtf"/, /"rofl"/, or /"pwned"/.
/FYI/, language doesn't rot, /OTOH/ our brains do. /:)/
/CU/ /l8r/
Just my /$.02/
Lie Ryan
>> You're on a slippery slope when you claim that people deserve whatever
>> mistreatment or misfortune comes their way through mere circumstances
>> of birth. I suggest you step back and actually read your messages
>> again and consider how others might interpret them.
>
> Paul: civilizations rise and fall, this is beyond our control. Every
> great power will utter fail at some point. Some die out like a slow
> burning candle, others go quickly and painfully from defeating blows
> in war time. This is an eventuality you must face friend. This whole
> save the whales BS is really getting on my nerves! Stop trying to play
> God Paul, it is not your decision when and where the blade shall
> fall.
>
> When a people stop evolving and no longer have anything productive to
> give to evolution, evolution stamps them out. If the Indians had
> developed gun power and industrialized America they might be running
> more than merely a casino. Oh No! Was that out of line, you will
> probably think so.
Ah.. Indian American is a good example. Since they had been so isolated
from the rest of the world, their language, culture, and technology did
not develop very well. An Orwellian nightmare of a single, unified
language will more or less have the same effect as what geographical
barrier did to the Indian American (and to other isolated cultures, e.g.
Indigenous Australian, Papuan, Japanese (during the period of
isolation), etc).
And contradictory to your belief, some Indian American DID adopt gun
powders when the white European come. And Europeans DID NOT develop gun
powders, the Chinese did. The Chinese invented early rockets and early
guns, and most importantly the gun powder itself.
Before you convinced everyone to use the same natural language, you must
convince everyone to use the same programming language. Nearly everyone
have their natural language as their first language (mindset language);
and nearly nobody have their favorite programming language as their
mother tongue. It will be much easier to convince people to switch to a
single, unified programming language since they don't have (or have much
less) cultural ties and personal affection to the language.
Hendrik van Rooyen
> Hendrik van Rooyen <hen...@microcorp.co.za> writes:
> > 2) Is about as useful as stating that any Turing complete language and
> > processor pair is capable of solving any computable problem, given enough
> > time. So why are we not all programming in brainfuck?
>
> Except the amount of circumlocution one language might happen to use
> over another is quite limited.
This is just an opinion, and it depends on the definition of "limited".
I have an example:
Translate into English (from Afrikaans):
"Die kat hardloop onder die tafel deur."
Literally, word for word, the sense of the words are:
"The cat runs under the table through."
The Afrikaans conveys the meaning precisely and succinctly.
I do not know of a simple way to convey the same meaning in English, to
describe the action that takes place when a cat starts running well before
one side of a table, dashes under it, and keeps running until it emerges at
the opposite side, still running, and keeps running some more, in one smooth
continuous burst of speed.
When you say "The cat runs under the table" the English kind of implies that
it goes there and tarries. Afrikaans would be "Die kat hardloop onder die
tafel in". ( "in" = "in"). "Die kat hardloop onder die tafel uit." ( "uit"
= "out" ).- Implies that the cat starts its run from under the table and
leaves the shelter. The bare: "Die kat hardloop onder die tafel." implies a
crazy cat that stays under the table while continuously running.
None of these concepts can, as far as I know, be succinctly stated in English,
because "English does not work like that" - there is no room in the syntax
for the addition of a spacial qualifier word that modifies the meaning of the
sentence. (not talking about words here that modify the verb - like fast or
slow - that is a different dimension)
So if you think the circumlocution is "quite limited", then your definition
of "limited" is somehow different to mine. :-)
8<------------ archeology -----------------
> > When a language lacks a word for a concept like "window", then (I
> > believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a
> > person will do, growing up with only that language.
>
> "Window" goes back to an Anglo-Saxon compound "windeye". Even if a
> word does not already exist in a given language for whatever novel
> item, the language is capable of creating from its own resources.
I think what normally happens is that a foreign word is assimilated into the
language, at the time the concept is encountered by the culture, as a result
of contact with an outside influence - That, as far as I know, (from hearsay)
is what happened in the case of "window" and the N'guni languages.
It also happened in Afrikaans at the time of the invention of television. -
from its "own resources" (a bunch of God fearing, hypocritical, rabid English
haters) came the official word "beeldradio" - "image radio" (having
successfully assimilated "radio" shortly before.) You hardly ever hear the
erstwhile official word now. It has been almost totally displaced
by "televisie". No prizes for guessing where that came from.
My opinion is that it is very difficult to avoid this borrowing when suddenly
faced with a new thing. A language can only use its own resources to slowly
evolve at its own pace. But then - I am probably wrong because I am not a
linguist.
- Hendrik
Hendrik van Rooyen
No - All I am asserting, is the unfashionable view that your first language
forms the way you think. It goes deeper than the simple vocabulary problem
you are describing, even though that is serious enough. I still assert that
if your language does not have a word for something, and you have never seen
that object, then you "__cannot__" think about it, because you do not have
the tools in your kitbag that you need to do so. - no word, no concept, the
empty set.
And I would even assert that, when you meet the object, and acquire a word for
it, it is painful for you to think about it, because it is a new thing for
you. You then have to go through a painful process of integrating that new
thing into your world view, before you are able to use and reference it
easily. - did, for instance, the concept of "an abstract class" just jump
into your head, and stick there immediately, complete with all its
ramifications, in the minute immediately after hearing about it for the first
time? Or did you need a bit of time to understand it and get comfortable?
And were you able to, and did you, think about it "before" hearing of it?
If you answer those questions honestly, you will catch my drift.
The opposite thing is of course a continual source of trouble - we all have
words for stuff we have never seen,
like "dragon", "ghost", "goblin", "leprechaun", "the current King of
France", "God", "Allah", "The Holy Trinity", "Lucifer", "Satan", "Griffin" -
and because we have words for these things, we can, and unfortunately do,
think about them, in a fuzzy fashion, to our own detriment. People even go
around killing other people, based on such fuzzy thinking about stuff that
can not be shown to exist.
- Hendrik