Domain: evertype.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to evertype.com.
Comments · 12
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We could always go back to Old English
Language changes with usage, so hard and soft g both seem to be reasonable conclusions. If not, we can always keep going back, all the way to Old English:
the Old English word gif 'if' (pronounced "yiff")
(from a completely unrelated article about entries for the Universal Coded Character Set that has, of course, bounced around the internet since).
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And where's Tengwar?
They've got symbols for a love hotel, a horse, and a steaming pile of poo, along with emoticons, and they still haven't accepted the Tengwar draft that's been around since '93? Where are these people's priorities!?
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Re:Klingon Linux distro
'm not sure what's at those codepoints that were proposed, but maybe if enough people just start using them, we can unofficially make it part of a extended Unicode standard?
No, that's the wrong approach. Creating a conflict with Unicode Consortium decisions will just be inconvenient for people and make the Consortium mad. The right approach is to encode Klingon in the Private Use Area. This has already been done. The encoding is registered at the Conscript Registry. The Klingon range is F8D0-F8FF. James Kass's Code2000 font includes Klingon glyphs using the Conscript codepoint assignments.
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Re:Klingon Linux distro
'm not sure what's at those codepoints that were proposed, but maybe if enough people just start using them, we can unofficially make it part of a extended Unicode standard?
No, that's the wrong approach. Creating a conflict with Unicode Consortium decisions will just be inconvenient for people and make the Consortium mad. The right approach is to encode Klingon in the Private Use Area. This has already been done. The encoding is registered at the Conscript Registry. The Klingon range is F8D0-F8FF. James Kass's Code2000 font includes Klingon glyphs using the Conscript codepoint assignments.
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Re:What's the Klingon phrase for...
Come on, who really has a Klingon-supporting font installed and set in the web browser
Surprisingly many: X.org and XFree86 seem to include a font called "MUTT ClearlyU PUA" that includes the Klingon alphabet and numerals according to the ConScript Unicode Registry encoding for Klingon.
Try this Klingon Unicode test page. Despite many browsers (e.g. Firefox) substituting glyphs from whatever font happens to support a character, if necessary, you may have to specify the exact font name to avoid getting the proper Klingon overridden by another font that uses the same code points for other things (for example, GhostScript adds "Standard Symbols L" that, annoyingly, overrides some of the Klingon characters), since the Unicode Consortium declined to standardise Klingon.
Qapla'!
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Re:What word?
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Re:How much localization is available in Windows?PS... I've since found this:
The Tengwar script was invented by the philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien as part of the mythological world he createdSo you can have an Elvish localisation as well
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Re:Conscript/Unicode
There is a conscript endcoding of Cirth and Tengwar. Given the limited audience and corpus of these scripts, and the WAY in which the corpora are limited (effectively the scripts and their languages are the work of one man as a fictional construct, and the literary-quality corpora are entirely his work), and despite my great respect both for the fellow who proposed their inclusion and is one of the key figures behind the conscript registry (and who has done tremendous work for minority non-fictional scripts and extinct non-fictional scripts as well), and for the creator of the font also referenced here, I personally don't see any good argument for the inclusion of Tengwar and Cirth in the Unicode standard. Conscript is a widely accepted PUA mapping, and that should be fine until and unless the corpora of these languages and scripts expands so that there are widely read texts in the scripts by someone other than the inventor of the script.
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Re:Unicode> aren't there real human languages that aren't in unicode yet?
Yes, although they're adding more and more of them in recent versions. Tagalog is there now. The prominent remaining ones (or at least the only ones I'd heard of) are Balinese and Javanese.
The usual answer to the "What about the real languages?" question is "Well, if a human language needs to be encoded, someone who knows it well should write up a formal proposal for it." It's kind of a catch-22, because most of the unencoded human languages are seldom-used minority scripts that don't have many computer-literate speakers. And most of the Unicode geeks either don't know enough about them or aren't interested enough. Or are busy writing proposals like this.
:-)In my former life as a Unicode geek I always wanted to write up a proposal for the "Character formerly known as Prince", but never quite got around to it....
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Re:Unicode
Make that: Klingon!
Wow.... -
Irish???
If anything, the script looks vaguely like handwritten gaelic latinoid script (Think book of Kells), but much less ornamented, and more like "day-to-day" writing. This script diverged from latin script in the 0-400A.D. period, but evolved and persisted until the 20th century, when Irish was standardised into contemporary latin script.
Irish dialects make extensive use "shebhus" and "urus" - aspirates and eclipses, indicated by accents in the old scripts - sebhus were usually dots above the letter, but could be diamonds, for example [modern script, just put a h in instead]. I note the presence of diamonds above some letters, and the apple-command-signs could conceivably be uru-forms?
The Irish also have set precedents of inventing their own alphabets: In addition to their own latin variant, they had the ancient ogham script, which is just plain wierd, originally written along corners of rocks and cut wood by notching them. Some people think it's just a A.D.-era encoding of a latin script, but many Irish people think that it's much older, and that just because one finds latin and old-irish inscriptions in Ogham, doesn't mean it was first used for them, since one can quite conceivably phonetically transcribe english into cyrillic or greek or japanese, for example. Plus, ogham looks like random scratches on rocks to people who don't know about it, and plus, most ogham is beleived to have been written on wooden rods- "the poet's slats" in ancient irish literature, which would be long-decayed by now. "Modern" standard Ogham even has a unicode table entry :-)
but all that's well known and would have been eliminated already, plus few of the words look particularly gaelic.
However, there are little known, mainly lost, and very strange "secret" Irishoid languages - e.g. one called "Shelta" that is the language that some members of the "Traveller" / "Tinker" racially distinct population in Ireland once spoke. [the page I've linked to looks to be 7/10ths made-up, I'm afraid, but, being in Ireland, I can confirm that travellers did have their own secret language, that they jealously guarded.] Travellers/Tinkers were somewhat like Romany gypsies in other countries in lifestyle, but unrelated - maybe it's shelta-in-irish-latinate-like-script.
Such people would have been mad into their own astrology, which would probably have the old irish constellations rather than known ones [It is known that there were old Irish traveller constellations, just not what they were :-)] - If one were an Irish tinker, inventing one's own script for your own mainly-illiterate community's language, it would probably end up looking like "hitherto-unknown-language-in-gaelic-like-script." .
Shelta isn't the only "secret" Irish language - Medieval guilds in Irish and Scottish* cities often had their own entire languages to guard their secrets - The dublin stonemason's seems to have been a dialect of Shelta with viking influences, for example.
*Ireland and scotland were pretty much the same until the tenth century - Confusingly, before the tenth century, someone saying "Scotia" probably meant Ireland. -
Re:Yeah, we think highly of foreigners here.
US currency does not use phoenecian numerals. While the place system of our numbering system borrows heavily from the phoenecians, the numerals themselves look quite different. Perhaps you were thinking of arabic numerals?
See Proposal for encoding the Phoenician script in ISO/IEC 10646 for a visual depiction of what phoenecian numerals look like.