Forum member's country flags

[Circlotron]

I think it would be good if next to each user's country flag it had a two-letter abbreviation of the country name. There are so many flags that I have no idea what they are. And no, I don't come from USA.

[oPossum]

Place the mouse pointer over the flag and it will tell you the country.

[Circlotron]

Oh yeah... 

[Ian.M]

Unfortunately I believe that should be ".... will usually tell you the country."

Sometimes it breaks (at least for me).  I'm not certain whether its related to server side stuff or if its a browser issue.  It hasn't happened often enough and annoyed me sufficiently for me to put effort into tracking it down.  If you've experienced the same symptoms (mousover country flag doesn't do anything when it *should* display title attribute text of the county name) please reply.

[Ed.Kloonk]

I've often wondered if instead of country, should it be nationality. In the past I've gotten a fair bit of push-back on that one.

 

[Someone]

Unfortunately I believe that should be ".... will usually tell you the country."

Sometimes it breaks (at least for me).  I'm not certain whether its related to server side stuff or if its a browser issue.  It hasn't happened often enough and annoyed me sufficiently for me to put effort into tracking it down.  If you've experienced the same symptoms (mousover country flag doesn't do anything when it *should* display title attribute text of the county name) please reply.

coming from the person choosing to not display a flag, lol

[CatalinaWOW]

Unfortunately I believe that should be ".... will usually tell you the country."

Sometimes it breaks (at least for me).  I'm not certain whether its related to server side stuff or if its a browser issue.  It hasn't happened often enough and annoyed me sufficiently for me to put effort into tracking it down.  If you've experienced the same symptoms (mousover country flag doesn't do anything when it *should* display title attribute text of the county name) please reply.

I have seen that, but very rarely, and the last time I recall has been a couple of years ago.  But then I don't often look.  I have learned the flags of the dozen or two countries inhabited by the people I most frequently read or interact with so looking is the exception rather than the rule.

[james_s]

I've often wondered if instead of country, should it be nationality. In the past I've gotten a fair bit of push-back on that one.

 

I don't really see the relevance of nationality. It's interesting to know where people are, it helps a lot in terms of giving appropriate advice for their location. I never really cared where anyone is originally from unless they wish to share.

[Ian.M]

coming from the person choosing to not display a flag, lol

The operative word here is 'choosing'.  I hope you will agree that the choice *NOT* to display a flag is preferable to false-flagging?

[Gyro]

You can choose or choose not to do pretty much anything - even if it's unhelpful to others, or by extension, yourself.

[Ian.M]

Yep and if I ask a question which would normally cause readers to want to check my location, i have provided insufficient information in that question.    I *TRY* not to do that!

Its not too hard to figure out my approximate location +/- several hundred miles, if you trawl through my posting history, but you'd have to do that manually as 3rd party search engines don't access members only areas.   I've been limiting PII and metadata in anything I post for over 30 years, and don't use social media, for *reasons*, and so far have been successful in keeping my actual identity below the search engine noise floor.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Yep and if I ask a question which would normally cause readers to want to check my location, i have provided insufficient information in that question.    I *TRY* not to do that!

Its not too hard to figure out my approximate location +/- several hundred miles, if you trawl through my posting history, but you'd have to do that manually as 3rd party search engines don't access members only areas.   I've been limiting PII and metadata in anything I post for over 30 years, and don't use social media, for *reasons*, and so far have been successful in keeping my actual identity below the search engine noise floor.

Yet you use your name as your handle?

 

[Ian.M]

Approximately 0.5% of the celtic diaspora share the name 'Ian' and if you narrow my identity down further, its even more common^*, so yes, I still use part of my name as my nym, as was customary when I first went online.  Good luck picking me out from the approx 200K other potential Ian.M's out there without 'three letter agency' scale resources to correlate the data.

* https://youtu.be/J2pBluew7aY

[Gyro]

Its not too hard to figure out my approximate location +/- several hundred miles, if you trawl through my posting history, but you'd have to do that manually as 3rd party search engines don't access members only areas.

I'll let you know if I ever work up the enthusiasm and sufficient curiosity to do that! 

[wilfred]

I think it would be good if next to each user's country flag it had a two-letter abbreviation of the country name. There are so many flags that I have no idea what they are. And no, I don't come from USA.

On a desktop I can hover the mouse pointer over the flag to get the country name. Does that not work on all platforms?

[tooki]

On iOS, a long press on it opens the context menu for the image, with the hover text as the heading.

[Bud]

I think it would be good if next to each user's country flag it had a two-letter abbreviation of the country name. There are so many flags that I have no idea what they are. And no, I don't come from USA.

On a desktop I can hover the mouse pointer over the flag to get the country name. Does that not work on all platforms?

No mouse on tablets and phones.

[Syntax Error]

How about showing the (IANA) country code from the IP where the post was generated?

[harerod]

I like the country flags for several reasons.

First of all, when I see an English speaking country, I can safely take the author's production as the gold standard of English. Conversely, for certain other countries, some caution, mixed with leniency, is called for.

Furthermore, the flag gives a hint at what common cultural knowledge I may expect expect from
the writer. Helps in communication.

Last but not least, one can read the post in what he assumes this person's accent might be. Great fun.
I mean, just read my posts wiz a German accent, as I read the Russians' with Russian accent.

[tooki]

I think it would be good if next to each user's country flag it had a two-letter abbreviation of the country name. There are so many flags that I have no idea what they are. And no, I don't come from USA.

On a desktop I can hover the mouse pointer over the flag to get the country name. Does that not work on all platforms?

No mouse on tablets and phones.

Very observant! However, they do have touchscreens.

[Kleinstein]

The country flags make sense for several reason. One get an idea on the main grid (voltage and frequency), language, time zone and options for ordering.
It is Ok is some don't want to share that information or are funny and think they are way off south.
With the mouse over one can learn a few of the less common flages.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Unfortunately I believe that should be ".... will usually tell you the country."

Sometimes it breaks (at least for me).  I'm not certain whether its related to server side stuff or if its a browser issue.  It hasn't happened often enough and annoyed me sufficiently for me to put effort into tracking it down.  If you've experienced the same symptoms (mousover country flag doesn't do anything when it *should* display title attribute text of the county name) please reply.

Oddly enough, yours is one that doesn't even show a flag. 

Mine shows my country of residence. I have dual citizenship. Doing it by nationality would create a serious existential crisis

[bsfeechannel]

No mouse on tablets and phones.

Just touch the flag and hold until a menu with actions appears. On top of that menu you'll see the description of the flag with the name of its respective country.

Works for both iOS and Android.

I like the country flags for several reasons.

First of all, when I see an English speaking country, I can safely take the author's production as the gold standard of English. Conversely, for certain other countries, some caution, mixed with leniency, is called for.

That can be misleading, since you can have foreign people living in the country indicated by the flag.

Furthermore, the flag gives a hint at what common cultural knowledge I may expect expect from
the writer. Helps in communication.

However, flags can be used as a political statement, and we've got plenty of examples in this forum. I find it a contradiction that this forum is apolitical when it allows you to use something that is intimately tied to politics in every single post. I know the intention is otherwise, but still.

Last but not least, one can read the post in what he assumes this person's accent might be. Great fun.
I mean, just read my posts wiz a German accent, as I read the Russians' with Russian accent.

I read all the posts with a Slim Pickens' accent.

[Bud]

Just touch the flag and hold until a menu with actions appears. On top of that menu you'll see the description of the flag with the name of its respective country.

Works for both iOS and Android.

Nope, it does not. (Samsung tablet with Android, iPone 5 with iOS)

[bsfeechannel]

Nope, it does not. (Samsung tablet with Android, iPone 5 with iOS)

It does too. iPad with iOS and Samsung phone with Android. Using Chrome on both, of course. Seek and ye shall find.

[bsfeechannel]

If you don't believe me.

[bsfeechannel]

On iOS, a long press on it opens the context menu for the image, with the hover text as the heading.

Same thing for Android.

[Whales]

<img .....  alt='ca' title='Canada' ... >

A lot of browsers (unfortunately) make it difficult for users to find alt text.  On desktop: hovering your mouse over the image should work.  I guess it varies on mobile.

I did not know the 'title' attribute existed, nor that it seems to override the purpose of 'alt' when you hover over an image in desktop FF.  For example my flag (to the left of this post) may be either au or Australia or both (or neither!) depending on your browser.

Code: [Select]

<li class="gender">Country: <img src="https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Themes/default/images/flags/au.png" alt="au" title="Australia" data-pagespeed-url-hash="3774463967" onload="pagespeed.CriticalImages.checkImageForCriticality(this);"/></li>

[Bud]

If you don't believe me.

Wow! They could not make it look any smaller ? 

[Nusa]

I like the country flags for several reasons.

First of all, when I see an English speaking country, I can safely take the author's production as the gold standard of English. Conversely, for certain other countries, some caution, mixed with leniency, is called for.

Gold standard of English is hard to define. There's British English, American English, Australian English, New Zealand English, and various other native Englishes, all of which are not quite the same and have many local usages and turns of phrase. And then there's ESL English, which is actually the most international version. Meaning two ESL speakers often communicate better in English than two native English speakers from different countries. Which I find quite amusing, even though I understand why.

[tooki]

I like the country flags for several reasons.

First of all, when I see an English speaking country, I can safely take the author's production as the gold standard of English. Conversely, for certain other countries, some caution, mixed with leniency, is called for.

Gold standard of English is hard to define. There's British English, American English, Australian English, New Zealand English, and various other native Englishes, all of which are not quite the same and have many local usages and turns of phrase. And then there's ESL English, which is actually the most international version. Meaning two ESL speakers often communicate better in English than two native English speakers from different countries. Which I find quite amusing, even though I understand why.

That’s basically complete and utter nonsense.

The fact is, while spoken English does have a bit of variation that’s occasionally confusing to a speaker of another dialect, it’s overwhelmingly mutually intelligible. When it comes to written English, if you standardize for spelling traits (o vs ou in words like color, -ise vs -ize, and a handful of other words), it’s almost impossible to tell the nationality of a writer. It takes a very astute reader to notice the clues.

My qualifications on this matter: I studied linguistics; my mom is a retired ESL teacher; I’m American but have lived abroad for years, regularly communicating with Brits, Aussies, and the occasional kiwi or South African, as well as with many nonnative speakers, as well as observing nonnative speakers between each other; and I worked as a technical writer (in English, for an international audience) for years.

What is true is that sometimes, two nonnative speakers will have complete understanding of an utterance, whereas a native speaker will not, if the nonnatives happen share a common misuse of English which happens to collide with native English. For example, here in Switzerland, nonnative speakers will routinely use the word “manager” to mean “executive officer”. A native speaker will instead “misunderstand” them as meaning the English meaning of the word.

ESL teachers in Japan joke that “the only people who can understand a Japanese ESL student’s English are other Japanese ESL students”.

So while nonnative <-> nonnative can occasionally outperform nonnative <-> native speaker communication, it will practically never exceed native <-> native speaker communication.

If the native speakers speak two very distinct dialects, one can of course run into trouble, but nonnative speakers will have just as much trouble if it differs a lot from the dialect they learned.

[tooki]

Nope, it does not. (Samsung tablet with Android, iPone 5 with iOS)

It does too. iPad with iOS and Samsung phone with Android. Using Chrome on both, of course. Seek and ye shall find.

And here’s what it looks like with Safari on iPhone:

[CatalinaWOW]

From what I can see, among non-professional linguists, the gold standard of English is whatever dialect the person speaking uses.  With a variety of different rationalizations.  History, number of speakers, official blessing or whatever.  It all makes a great theological argument, a lot like the number of angels on the head of a pin. 

I just feel fortunate that my native tongue is so widely spoken and understood.  Between English and my two less developed languages I can communicate with probably half of the worlds population.  And can probably find someone to communicate with almost wherever I am in the world.   I am too old to add Chinese to bump that number up by a big amount.

[Gyro]

Let's just cut the linguistics 'noise' (polite word) and concentrate on the basics...

It is useful to know what country a member is currently in so that advice can be relevant to their location - sourcing items, mains related stuff, physical environmental factors etc.

Hopefully nobody seriously gives a stuff about a member's ethnicity, country of birth, or background. It is purely a practical thing!

[gnuarm]

I don't get what all the hoopla is about.  The Heisenberg uncertainty principle limits how accurately your location can be known anyway.  Well, if you want to know velocity at the same time. 

In reality both my location and my velocity are changing at a regular rate anyway.  So it can't be terribly important to know it at any particular moment.

[magic]

Let's just cut the linguistics 'noise' (polite word) and concentrate on the basics...

It is useful to know what country a member is currently in so that advice can be relevant to their location - sourcing items, mains related stuff, physical environmental factors etc.

Hopefully nobody seriously gives a stuff about a member's ethnicity, country of birth, or background. It is purely a practical thing!

Why, there surely is more to it than just sourcing components. You could replace this post with just your flag and in the context of this thread it would read almost the same to me

[StillTrying]

Good luck picking me out from the approx 200K other potential Ian.M's out there without 'three letter agency' scale resources to correlate the data.

I always assume I know your name, but that's just a guess from the wild blueyonder, so I might not.

[Zero999]

Now this forum supports Unicode, why still use images of flags? The good thing about text is it can be zoomed and scaled, without distortion and pixelation.
🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧

[JohnnyMalaria]

Shouldn't that be UK? It has the saltire for St. Patrick.

[magic]

Now this forum supports Unicode, why still use images of flags? The good thing about text is it can be zoomed and scaled, without distortion and pixelation.

Maybe because with increasingly nonsense addition to the standard, font designers are proportionally reluctant to bother implementing it in full

Can't wait for every Pokemon to get its own glyph

Use SVG images if you must.

[Zero999]

Now this forum supports Unicode, why still use images of flags? The good thing about text is it can be zoomed and scaled, without distortion and pixelation.

Maybe because with increasingly nonsense addition to the standard, font designers are proportionally reluctant to bother implementing it in full

Can't wait for every Pokemon to get its own glyph

Use SVG images if you must.

That's odd. It works for me. What operating system and browser are you using?

[tkamiya]

It really doesn't matter to me that much.  But if I have to have an opinion, I'd prefer LOCATION.  I really don't care what country someone represent, born in, or have an affiliation to....  I just want to know, if I suggest a vendor for parts, for example, it's relevant to the OP.

As to Japanese English only understandable to Japanese English speakers...  I disagree.  I was born in Japan and lived there for 17 some odd years.  I'm now in US and has been for 30+ years.  I cannot understand spoken English by many Japanese folks.  My girlfriend is a retired English teacher and is a US born American.  She agrees many foreign English speakers speak better English than many Americans.  But when it comes to idioms, native speakers have the lead.  And languages do not translate 1 to 1.  For example, myself included, Japanese English speakers have problem with articles, a, an, the because it doesn't exist in their native language.  I have yet to see a concise and correct definition of when and how they can be properly used.

By the way....  English taught in Japan is a mixture of British and American English.  Teachers explain "do you have" is an equivalent of "have you."  I used to speak with slight Australian accent because I learned English by speaking to Australian hams.  I found out really quickly, a word "bank" is spoken so differently that I had to modify my speech.

[Zero999]

Now this forum supports Unicode, why still use images of flags? The good thing about text is it can be zoomed and scaled, without distortion and pixelation.

Maybe because with increasingly nonsense addition to the standard, font designers are proportionally reluctant to bother implementing it in full

Can't wait for every Pokemon to get its own glyph

Use SVG images if you must.

I've just tried it on the Winwoes 10 machine at work and I see the letters GB in different sizes, which is a little better.
_{GBGBGBGBGBGBGBGBGBGBGB}

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.

[harerod]

[quote author=tkamiya
...
For example, myself included, Japanese English speakers have problem with articles, a, an, the because it doesn't exist in their native language.  I have yet to see a concise and correct definition of when and how they can be properly used.
...


Have a problem... *scnr*
ところで、日本語を大好きだよ。
よろしく、ドイツから。

[magic]

I've just tried it on the Winwoes 10 machine at work and I see the letters GB in different sizes, which is a little better.

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.

Now you are becoming enlightened

I think it depends not only on OS but also on the font in use, though I may be wrong (special handling by the font renderer or whatever) and of course every desktop/mobile OS these days ships with its own default font(s) so for many users it's one and the same. I take the pragmatic approach and assume that everything that is actually useful (Latin/Greek and derivatives, most Asian runes, etc) is likely to be supported, less useful stuff (Egyptian hieroglyphs) is unlikely to be included in most fonts and silly gimmicks (emoticons, flags, pokemon) are likely to be supported by gimmicky software like the latest version of iOS.

I use Greek letters a lot and no one has ever called me out.

The country extension is utterly because you are supposed to write a country code in two English letters in some weird encoding (not the basic ASCII part), which may or may not optionally be rendered specially by software which knows the country's flag. It fails on all the original goals of Unicode, which were to reduce software bloat, provide consistent rendering of content text across platforms and enable people to use computers in their native language.

[Zero999]

I've just tried it on the Winwoes 10 machine at work and I see the letters GB in different sizes, which is a little better.

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.

Now you are becoming enlightened

I think it depends not only on OS but also on the font in use, though I may be wrong (special handling by the font renderer or whatever) and of course every desktop/mobile OS these days ships with its own default font(s) so for many users it's one and the same. I take the pragmatic approach and assume that everything that is actually useful (Latin/Greek and derivatives, most Asian runes, etc) is likely to be supported, less useful stuff (Egyptian hieroglyphs) is unlikely to be included in most fonts and silly gimmicks (emoticons, flags, pokemon) are likely to be supported by gimmicky software like the latest version of iOS.

I use Greek letters a lot and no one has ever called me out.

The country extension is utterly because you are supposed to write a country code in two English letters in some weird encoding (not the basic ASCII part), which may or may not optionally be rendered specially by software which knows the country's flag. It fails on all the original goals of Unicode, which were to reduce software bloat, provide consistent rendering of content text across platforms and enable people to use computers in their native language.

I don't see the problem with having flags, but things such a dumb emojis are a big pile of crap. 💩. Wow, Winwoes really is shit. It supports the useless turd emoji, over country flags which actually have some use.  💩💩💩

[Zero999]

I've just tried it on the Winwoes 10 machine at work and I see the letters GB in different sizes, which is a little better.

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.

Now you are becoming enlightened

I think it depends not only on OS but also on the font in use, though I may be wrong (special handling by the font renderer or whatever) and of course every desktop/mobile OS these days ships with its own default font(s) so for many users it's one and the same. I take the pragmatic approach and assume that everything that is actually useful (Latin/Greek and derivatives, most Asian runes, etc) is likely to be supported, less useful stuff (Egyptian hieroglyphs) is unlikely to be included in most fonts and silly gimmicks (emoticons, flags, pokemon) are likely to be supported by gimmicky software like the latest version of iOS.

I use Greek letters a lot and no one has ever called me out.

The country extension is utterly because you are supposed to write a country code in two English letters in some weird encoding (not the basic ASCII part), which may or may not optionally be rendered specially by software which knows the country's flag. It fails on all the original goals of Unicode, which were to reduce software bloat, provide consistent rendering of content text across platforms and enable people to use computers in their native language.

I don't see the problem with having flags, but things such a dumb emojis are a big pile of crap. 💩. Wow, Winwoes really is shit. It supports the useless turd emoji, over country flags which actually have some use.  💩💩💩

I don't understand - how is this a Windows thing (or lack of)?

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.

[TimFox]

[quote author=tkamiya
...
For example, myself included, Japanese English speakers have problem with articles, a, an, the because it doesn't exist in their native language.  I have yet to see a concise and correct definition of when and how they can be properly used.
...


Have a problem... *scnr*
ところで、日本語を大好きだよ。
よろしく、ドイツから。

I first ran into this situation back in graduate school in the US, where a Japanese colleague would ask advice from us before submitting a technical paper for publication.  When we corrected his use of articles, he naturally asked us for the grammatical rules on article usage, and none of us could find them.  I then found that UK subjects would listen to "the rock music" and go "in hospital", while we Americans listen to "rock music" and go "in the hospital".  I believe that the Russian language also does not use articles.

[JohnnyMalaria]

I've just tried it on the Winwoes 10 machine at work and I see the letters GB in different sizes, which is a little better.

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.

Now you are becoming enlightened

I think it depends not only on OS but also on the font in use, though I may be wrong (special handling by the font renderer or whatever) and of course every desktop/mobile OS these days ships with its own default font(s) so for many users it's one and the same. I take the pragmatic approach and assume that everything that is actually useful (Latin/Greek and derivatives, most Asian runes, etc) is likely to be supported, less useful stuff (Egyptian hieroglyphs) is unlikely to be included in most fonts and silly gimmicks (emoticons, flags, pokemon) are likely to be supported by gimmicky software like the latest version of iOS.

I use Greek letters a lot and no one has ever called me out.

The country extension is utterly because you are supposed to write a country code in two English letters in some weird encoding (not the basic ASCII part), which may or may not optionally be rendered specially by software which knows the country's flag. It fails on all the original goals of Unicode, which were to reduce software bloat, provide consistent rendering of content text across platforms and enable people to use computers in their native language.

I don't see the problem with having flags, but things such a dumb emojis are a big pile of crap. 💩. Wow, Winwoes really is shit. It supports the useless turd emoji, over country flags which actually have some use.  💩💩💩

I don't understand - how is this a Windows thing (or lack of)?

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.

Well, the two letter codes for flags aren't necessarily correct.

The Union Flag is not the flag of Great Britain (GB). It is the flag of the United Kingdom (UK). Is there a correct emoji for the flag of Great Britain (i.e., just the Cross of St. George and Saltire of St. Andrew)? If not, that's one good reason not to use emojis.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Great_Britain

[Siwastaja]

Given that Unicode support is patchy across platforms: how is one supposed to know what glyphs are widely supported?

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.

I hope that the important Greek letters and symbols such as  μ, Ω, π , Δ, ° etc. used in electronics widely supported,

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.

[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]

Given that Unicode support is patchy across platforms: how is one supposed to know what glyphs are widely supported?

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.

I hope that the important Greek letters and symbols such as  μ, Ω, π , Δ, ° etc. used in electronics widely supported,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

”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]

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.

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.

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...

Well, I’m a bad example for that, since I’m American and English is my native language!

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. (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]

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...

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.

[Zero999]

Given that Unicode support is patchy across platforms: how is one supposed to know what glyphs are widely supported?

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.

I hope that the important Greek letters and symbols such as  μ, Ω, π , Δ, ° etc. used in electronics widely supported,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

”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.

I had a play with flags and emojis in LibreOffice. They work, but are all monochrome, which is fine as it could be printed in monochrome, apart from the French flag and no doubt others consisting of just stripes. The really lame thing is they're all circles rather than squares.

[TimFox]

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...

One of the best books about grammar that I have read recently (which I can't find now) pointed out that grammar textbooks are not very useful for native speakers of the language, but are very useful for those learning it as a second language.

[mathsquid]

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?”

I'll share a related anecdote.

I occasionally proofread stuff for a colleague whose first language isn't English. One time he had written that something happened "in November 12." I corrected it to "on November 12" and he asked why. I didn't have a good answer for him--I just knew which was right. His reasoning was that when we say a month, we use "in" (e.g. "in April") and when we use a day, we use "on" (e.g. "on the 10th" or "on Tuesday").

I had never considered any rule, but we worked out that "in" goes with months, and "on" goes with days, and that "november 12" is a day, and thus we use "in".

[gnuarm]

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?”

I'll share a related anecdote.

I occasionally proofread stuff for a colleague whose first language isn't English. One time he had written that something happened "in November 12." I corrected it to "on November 12" and he asked why. I didn't have a good answer for him--I just knew which was right. His reasoning was that when we say a month, we use "in" (e.g. "in April") and when we use a day, we use "on" (e.g. "on the 10th" or "on Tuesday").

I had never considered any rule, but we worked out that "in" goes with months, and "on" goes with days, and that "november 12" is a day, and thus we use "in".

A day is a specific date and so "on" indicates that date exactly.  Any longer period of time would use "in" since it only indicates the date generally within that time frame. 

But I agree that native speakers often don't know why they speak the way they do.  A fellow grad student was asking me the difference between special/specially and special/especially.  The dictionary indicated they were the same.  I told him I never hear anyone say "specially" or "especial" but that was just my familiarity. 

He was a good guy, an Iranian prior to the Shah being deposed.  I think he was not a Shah supporter, but he didn't talk about it much, just once.  There were a lot of Iranian students at the time and he seemed to be someone most of them deferred to, so perhaps he was from a family with authority.  He was very intelligent and wanting to learn as much as he could about pretty much everything.

[newbrain]

I had never considered any rule, but we worked out that "in" goes with months, and "on" goes with days,

And for added fun, "at" goes with time.
So something happened in November, on the 12th, at 9.

If you really squint, you might say that one goes from the most general "in", to something that defines better the position (in time) "on", to something specific "at".

In Italian, it's more mixed.

That would be "di novembre, il 12, alle 9"
Literally "of", "the", "at the".

Similarly, Swedish and French:

"i november, den 12, klockan 9"
"in", ~"the" (complicated...), "the clock", often abbreviated as kl.

"en novembre, le 12, à 9 heure"
"in", "the", "at".

[JohnnyMalaria]

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?”

I'll share a related anecdote.

I occasionally proofread stuff for a colleague whose first language isn't English. One time he had written that something happened "in November 12." I corrected it to "on November 12" and he asked why. I didn't have a good answer for him--I just knew which was right. His reasoning was that when we say a month, we use "in" (e.g. "in April") and when we use a day, we use "on" (e.g. "on the 10th" or "on Tuesday").

I had never considered any rule, but we worked out that "in" goes with months, and "on" goes with days, and that "november 12" is a day, and thus we use "in".

To most British-English speakers, "on November 12" looks and sounds odd. Even though I lived in the US nearly three decades, "I'll see you on June two" instead of "I'll see you on June the second" or "I'll see you on the second of June" still sounds very strange. Then, of course, there's the whole "2/6" vs "6/2" debacle...

[tooki]

A day is a specific date and so "on" indicates that date exactly.  Any longer period of time would use "in" since it only indicates the date generally within that time frame.

Except that just as a month contains a range of days, a day contains a range of times, and we use yet another preposition: on the 17th at 3pm.

But I agree that native speakers often don't know why they speak the way they do.  A fellow grad student was asking me the difference between special/specially and special/especially.  The dictionary indicated they were the same.  I told him I never hear anyone say "specially" or "especial" but that was just my familiarity. 

English doesn’t have a word “especial”, but specially and especially mean subtly different things:
Specially means “for a special purpose”, as in, “this plate was specially prepared since Cindy is allergic to peanuts”, meaning that it was prepared in a special way. Critically, the “specially” does not actually refer to it being for Cindy, though we clearly infer that from context.
Especially means “in particular” and “mainly”, in addition to “for a special purpose”: e.g. “I especially like the pineapple gummy bears”, “this dish was made especially for Cindy” (it could be prepared totally normally, but it was made because Cindy really likes it.)

Consider “this dish was specially prepared especially for Cindy” — it means we really like Cindy so we not only made it just for her, but we also made it in a special way.


There’s big overlap between the two words, and in many situations both can work. If in doubt, use “especially”.

[tooki]

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?”

I'll share a related anecdote.

I occasionally proofread stuff for a colleague whose first language isn't English. One time he had written that something happened "in November 12." I corrected it to "on November 12" and he asked why. I didn't have a good answer for him--I just knew which was right. His reasoning was that when we say a month, we use "in" (e.g. "in April") and when we use a day, we use "on" (e.g. "on the 10th" or "on Tuesday").

I had never considered any rule, but we worked out that "in" goes with months, and "on" goes with days, and that "november 12" is a day, and thus we use "in".

To most British-English speakers, "on November 12" looks and sounds odd. Even though I lived in the US nearly three decades, "I'll see you on June two" instead of "I'll see you on June the second" or "I'll see you on the second of June" still sounds very strange. Then, of course, there's the whole "2/6" vs "6/2" debacle...

”On November twelve” is wrong in American English, too. Even if written as “November 12” (as recommended by the major American style guides), it’s always read as “November twelfth”. Whether or not you write the ordinal marker (“…th”, “…rd”, etc), dates are always treated as ordinal numbers, not cardinal numbers.

[TimFox]

The well-known American version of a traditional Catalan Christmas carol (not a translation) starts "On December five and twenty...".  Poetic license triumphs over pedantry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fum,_Fum,_Fum

[gnuarm]

To most British-English speakers, "on November 12" looks and sounds odd. Even though I lived in the US nearly three decades, "I'll see you on June two" instead of "I'll see you on June the second" or "I'll see you on the second of June" still sounds very strange. Then, of course, there's the whole "2/6" vs "6/2" debacle...

That's easy to fix, 2021/06/02, computer time from msd to lsd.  I use computer time in file names so they sort chronologically and alphabetically at the same time.  Or is that on the same time???

[JohnnyMalaria]

To most British-English speakers, "on November 12" looks and sounds odd. Even though I lived in the US nearly three decades, "I'll see you on June two" instead of "I'll see you on June the second" or "I'll see you on the second of June" still sounds very strange. Then, of course, there's the whole "2/6" vs "6/2" debacle...

That's easy to fix, 2021/06/02, computer time from msd to lsd.  I use computer time in file names so they sort chronologically and alphabetically at the same time.  Or is that on the same time???

I always write dates as, for example, 17-May-2021 or 17-May-21 on everything*. Previous employers quite rightly had SOPs requiring it. Not as language-neutral as 2021/05/17, though.

*Unless it's a form that dictates the format.

[TimFox]

One sensible suggestion from decades ago was to use Roman numerals for month and Arabic numerals for day and year, e.g., “17 V 2017” or “V 17 2017” for the seventeenth day of May.  I don’t think it caught on anywhere, though.

[Circlotron]

And for added fun, "at" goes with time.
So something happened in November, on the 12th, at 9.

I think of "in" as referring to a time period such as November and "at" referring to an instant of time such as 9AM.

[Nusa]

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.

Perhaps because flags can, and often do, change over time. So do governments and country names. Never mind the political blow-back of including flags that some refuse to recognize as legitimate.

A turd, however, is universal. Everyone understands it.

[magic]

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.

I use Linux and never experience that deficiency
It is a gimmick, I'm not even sure who or what uses it.

But I would sooner use a poo than some "flag" which isn't even guaranteed to display as a flag. Sorry guys, AFAIK Microsoft is perfectly compliant here by displaying the English abbreviation. That's what Unicode is about these days, shoving English down people's throats and pure white supremacy Poo at least is somewhat international and I don't think anyone in the world would have major doubts about the meaning. Poo is unironically a better fit for Unicode's mission.

[Zero999]

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.

I use Linux and never experience that deficiency
It is a gimmick, I'm not even sure who or what uses it.

But I would sooner use a poo than some "flag" which isn't even guaranteed to display as a flag. Sorry guys, AFAIK Microsoft is perfectly compliant here by displaying the English abbreviation. That's what Unicode is about these days, shoving English down people's throats and pure white supremacy Poo at least is somewhat international and I don't think anyone in the world would have major doubts about the meaning. Poo is unironically a better fit for Unicode's mission.

White supremacy. lol Unicode supports the flags of plenty of countries with a majority black population and the emojis even support different skin colours.    🇯🇲 👳🏾👦🏻👩🏽👧🏿

[tooki]

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.

I use Linux and never experience that deficiency
It is a gimmick, I'm not even sure who or what uses it.

But I would sooner use a poo than some "flag" which isn't even guaranteed to display as a flag. Sorry guys, AFAIK Microsoft is perfectly compliant here by displaying the English abbreviation. That's what Unicode is about these days, shoving English down people's throats and pure white supremacy Poo at least is somewhat international and I don't think anyone in the world would have major doubts about the meaning. Poo is unironically a better fit for Unicode's mission.

What a load of 💩!

Windows displays the flags as the two-letter ISO 3166 country codes, the same ones as country domains in URLs. (Which is also how the flags are encoded under the hood.)

[Zero999]

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.

I use Linux and never experience that deficiency
It is a gimmick, I'm not even sure who or what uses it.

But I would sooner use a poo than some "flag" which isn't even guaranteed to display as a flag. Sorry guys, AFAIK Microsoft is perfectly compliant here by displaying the English abbreviation. That's what Unicode is about these days, shoving English down people's throats and pure white supremacy Poo at least is somewhat international and I don't think anyone in the world would have major doubts about the meaning. Poo is unironically a better fit for Unicode's mission.

What a load of 💩!

Windows displays the flags as the two-letter ISO 3166 country codes, the same ones as country domains in URLs. (Which is also how the flags are encoded under the hood.)

I think his post is somewhat tongue in cheek. Anyway, it looks like turd emojis will become common place on this forum now. I shouldn't have started it. It's a load of.💩

[Ian.M]

🙈🙉🙊

[harerod]

...Anyway, it looks like turd emojis will become common place on this forum now. I shouldn't have started it. It's a load of.💩

Let me be the first to congratulate you on this achievement. 

[magic]

Actually, I could swear that the icon used to be like that on this forum in the past. Not sure what happened; maybe I remember some other forum?

Windows displays the flags as the two-letter ISO 3166 country codes, the same ones as country domains in URLs. (Which is also how the flags are encoded under the hood.)

But that's exactly what I mean
If your software lack the flag graphic and/or chooses to render the sequence as characters for any reason, you get some English abbreviation regardless of your own locale.

Most people using computers these days don't even know what a TLD is. They fire up "the google", type "facebook" into the search bar, click some flag picture to appear in their post and behold it turn into a sequence of foreign runes on their other Windows machine

[tooki]

Actually, I could swear that the icon used to be like that on this forum in the past. Not sure what happened; maybe I remember some other forum?

Windows displays the flags as the two-letter ISO 3166 country codes, the same ones as country domains in URLs. (Which is also how the flags are encoded under the hood.)

But that's exactly what I mean
If your software lack the flag graphic and/or chooses to render the sequence as characters for any reason, you get some English abbreviation regardless of your own locale.

Then you missed the point: the ISO abbreviations aren’t English. Some are, because they’re English-speaking countries. But I assure you, “CH” for Switzerland isn’t English. “DE” for Germany isn’t English. “HR” for Croatia isn’t English. Fundamentally, the ISO abbreviations first try to be abbreviations in the native language of the country. (I can only assume Hungary got “HU” because every conceivable abbreviation of Magyarország was already needed for one of the many countries that start with M.)

And others for non-Roman-alphabet countries, like “JP” for Japan and “TH” for Thailand could just as much be English, French, or any number of languages that use the Latin alphabet. The similarities of many country names across languages is why so many country codes make sense in English, but also in their native languages and many others.

[RJSV]

Holding contact w FLAG works, on my Alcatel / Android op phone.
Although it looked like 'chrome' menu stuff, it shows country up top of menu.