New Unicode Bug Discovered For Common Japanese Character "No"

AmiMoJo writes: Some users have noticed that the Japanese character "no", which is extremely common in the Japanese language (forming parts of many words, or meaning something similar to the English word "of" on its own). The Unicode standard has apparently marked the character as sometimes being used in mathematical formulae, causing it to be rendering in a different font to the surrounding text in certain applications. Similar but more widespread issues have plagued Unicode for decades due to the decision to unify dissimilar characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Comments

Why not just use English, and only English?

[Anonymous Coward]

In practice, English is the only language we need.

It's already a first language to hundreds of millions of people. It's already a second language to billions. It's even a third, fourth, fifth and sometimes sixth language to many millions more.

It's the language of international business. It's the language of international academia. It's the language of international engineering. It's the language of international aircraft control.

It uses a sensible alphabet that's easy to represent digitally. It's a democratic language that will draw from other languages where necessary and useful. It's a language that has proven it can adapt to changing circumstances.

We shouldn't strive to eliminate other languages, of course. They do have their value, but more as historic curiosities for linguists and historians rather than something to use on a daily basis.

Computers are already able to do amazing things with English text. There's just no need to support other languages.