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| harerod:
TimFox, there are books with this kind of information. However, we try to keep those from the general American public. :) The neural nets of native speakers are trained by huge amounts of native speaker input. Since ain't nobody got time for that, we learners try to find shortcuts, a.k.a. rules for what you have developed a gut feeling for. Those rules are far from perfect, but help us get started. For a while I took the country flags as a pointer about that person's cultural background. For instance, I see tooki's Swiss flag, so I won't use an idiom like "in the ballpark" when addressing him, because he might not be familiar with baseball... |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on May 17, 2021, 04:35:53 pm --- --- Quote from: Zero999 on May 17, 2021, 10:17:46 am ---Given that Unicode support is patchy across platforms: how is one supposed to know what glyphs are widely supported? --- End quote --- Easy - don't assume, use what you really need. Simply because something is just technically possible and novel, doesn't mean you have to use it. Don't expect new features, especially unnecessary gimmicks to work. --- Quote ---I hope that the important Greek letters and symbols such as μ, Ω, π , Δ, ° etc. used in electronics widely supported, --- End quote --- Indeed, let's hope that. I think it's fairly safe assumption they work 99.99% of the time because everybody have been using computers to produce the symbols in question since 1990's, they are not some unnecessary few-years-old gimmick like the flags. --- End quote --- The fact that emoji spread from a Japan-only SMS novelty to something fundamentally supported on all platforms and used on a daily basis would hint at them not being “unnecessary gimmicks”. Being dismissive of it is just gonna get you in trouble, if you’re a developer of any kind. FWIW, Linux was the last major holdout platform; Mac and Windows have had emoji support for a decade at this point, it’s nothing new. What irks me a lot more is the small number of things that still don’t support Unicode at all. It’s shrinking, but… why?!? Developers should have moved to Unicode around the turn of the millennium. --- Quote from: Zero999 on May 17, 2021, 04:01:28 pm ---I'm perplexed at why any OS would go to the trouble of implementing useless parts of the Unicode standard, like turd emojis, whilst ignoring more useful things such as country flags. :palm: --- End quote --- It’s clearly not a technical limitation, since it’s not as though they’d need a separate code path. Emoji are nothing more than color bitmap or vector glyphs. Our OSes have supported color text rendering for ages (including pixel-level color, thanks to code paths for both grayscale and subpixel antialiasing), they’ve supported bitmap fonts for even longer, and so it likely wasn’t a big deal to allow color fonts. Note that extra code is only needed for color emoji support; one could, in theory, install a black-and-white emoji font to any OS whose Unicode implementation has Supplementary Multilingual Plane support. (Which any self-respecting implementation does, since all sorts of useful character blocks are among those.) Nobody knows for sure, but the leading theory is that Microsoft is attempting to avoid the issue of flags of disputed areas like Taiwan. This has been at times troublesome for other vendors. --- Quote from: Zero999 on May 17, 2021, 10:17:46 am ---Given that Unicode support is patchy across platforms: how is one supposed to know what glyphs are widely supported? I hope that the important Greek letters and symbols such as μ, Ω, π , Δ, ° etc. used in electronics widely supported, otherwise we might as well stick with plain old ASCII. :palm: --- End quote --- ”Patchy” is quite an overstatement. Every major platform has Unicode support now, and has had it for years. The issue of glyphs is, for the most part, not one of Unicode support, but of the fonts. But frankly, that problem is also one that was solved ages ago. The symbols you list are ones that were fully supported in the very earliest Unicode fonts. (In fact, they were also supported in many 8-bit character sets. As someone who’s been a Mac user since the early 90s, I have never owned a computer whose default character set didn’t include all 5 glyphs you listed, since the old Mac Roman character set included them all.) The only places where Unicode seems to still not be supported properly (or at least not always by default) is in some web server backends (like if a forum’s backend database is mistakenly configured as some ASCII code page instead of Unicode), the Windows DOS prompt, and things like basic ANSI C. In contrast, every major platform (and most minor ones) uses Unicode for its text handling APIs, so a developer using the APIs should get Unicode support for free. What annoys me is Luddite admins and devs who, when encountering an issue with Unicode, instead of fixing it just takes the lazy way out and says “use ASCII instead”, contributing to the dragged-out transition to Unicode. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: harerod on May 17, 2021, 05:23:19 pm ---TimFox, there are books with this kind of information. However, we try to keep those from the general American public. :) The neural nets of native speakers are trained by huge amounts of native speaker input. Since ain't nobody got time for that, we learners try to find shortcuts, a.k.a. rules for what you have developed a gut feeling for. Those rules are far from perfect, but help us get started. --- End quote --- Indeed, the only native speakers who truly, thoroughly understand and can verbalize all* the rules of their own language are the ones who’ve worked for years teaching their language to nonnative speakers, since those students ask the deep “why?” questions that nobody else asks. (Linguists also study things like this in depth, but without the constant “whys” from students will likely not cover all of them.) Teachers who only teach to fellow native speakers (like in grade school) cover style and mostly prescriptivist grammar rules, but don’t know the deep grammar that governs all sorts of other things. Disclaimer: my mom worked as an ESL (English as a second language) teacher for 40+ years, all the way up to Cambridge Proficiency, and I studied linguistics. ;) *”all” being untrue in a strict sense, of course, since many rules are still unknown, and any given teacher won’t have been asked about every single thing. But they’ll know FAR more than a person who doesn’t have extensive experience teaching nonnative speakers. --- Quote from: harerod on May 17, 2021, 05:23:19 pm ---For a while I took the country flags as a pointer about that person's cultural background. For instance, I see tooki's Swiss flag, so I won't use an idiom like "in the ballpark" when addressing him, because he might not be familiar with baseball... --- End quote --- Well, I’m a bad example for that, since I’m American and English is my native language! :P Use gridiron (American) football terminology, though, and I’m lost, since I never did understand that game or have even the slightest interest in it. :P (I’m the guy who bought the “[university] Football - Undefeated” t-shirt because of how happy I am that my university is a nerdy one that doesn’t have a football team!) But indeed, I do live in Switzerland, so one might use the flag to determine which vendors to recommend, for example. |
| harerod:
tooki, I picked you on purpose. I was hoping for somebody else to "enlighten" me, though. You are just too good an example how the country flags could backfire. :) Several years ago, while recovering from a severe accident, I went to uni to take English and Japanese classes. Well, I went for Japanese and stayed for English linguistics. My English phonetics and language teacher was only a few years older than I. We share the Japanese language as a common hobby. Although he has a doctorate in German literature, to this day our near daily exchanges are in English. This acquaintance gives me some background insight into the fascinating world of ESL language teaching. That being said - I am just an amateur language lover who enjoys seeing the beautiful English language in action on EEVBLOG. :) Edit: fixed typos |
| gnuarm:
--- Quote from: harerod on May 17, 2021, 05:23:19 pm ---TimFox, there are books with this kind of information. However, we try to keep those from the general American public. :) The neural nets of native speakers are trained by huge amounts of native speaker input. Since ain't nobody got time for that, we learners try to find shortcuts, a.k.a. rules for what you have developed a gut feeling for. Those rules are far from perfect, but help us get started. For a while I took the country flags as a pointer about that person's cultural background. For instance, I see tooki's Swiss flag, so I won't use an idiom like "in the ballpark" when addressing him, because he might not be familiar with baseball... --- End quote --- I am a native speaker of American English and not a day goes by that I don't curse the language, although usually for the spelling rather than the grammar. I think while my grammar is far from perfect, there aren't many who know the flaws, rather they notice I don't talk quite like them meaning I don't use as many flaws. Languages are hard and there is virtually no effort to correct that. Rather we just try to document usage with the schools teaching the norm from 40 years ago. Language is a terrible way to communicate, but it's better than the other options... well, most of them. There are a few means of non-verbal communication that are pretty nice. |
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