Forum member's country 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.