On Thu, 2017-06-29 at 07:09 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > But I guess we don't extend that respect to Arabic (or in the past, > Turkish). This result? It decides to completely ignore the clear and > simple known precepts of the Arabic language, and decide on some kind > of byte order. Why stop there?? Why not say "hey, all this English > stuff? It's just ASCII and we can't read numbers!" No? I guess not.
Your message could have been written in such a way that it would be unambiguously correct Arabic and incorrect English, but it wasn't. The purpose of communication is to communicate. As a result, the standards we use for communication in email are designed to allow conversations to be communicated unambiguously, regardless of whether they're written in Arabic or English. Such unambiguity is needed for things like line wrapping algorithms to work correctly. Compare: > I call for judgement on the following statement : أدعو إلى إصدار حكم بشأن > البيان التالي > دعو إلى إصدار حكم بشأن البيان التالي : I call for judgement on the following > statement In my text editor, these two lines look identical, except that the former is left-justified and the latter is right-justified. (Your email client may vary; some email clients I'm aware of aren't capable of processing bidirectional text correctly. See the attached pictures at two different window widths.) I've put a lot of effort into learning how computers support various texts, whether it's the variable width of Japanese or the right-to-left behaviour of Arabic. Communication is about saying what you mean; and computers actually give you the tools to say what you mean. As such, the intentionally ambiguous reading doesn't exist; there's one way to write the text so that it's clearly an English sentence, and another to write it so that it's clearly an Arabic sentence. Your message contained the former, but it could easily have contained the latter, and then it would have been interpreted as Arabic. Saying "A byte stream containing Arabic text must be interpreted as though it were laid out left to right" would be in its own right disrespectful to the language, because that's not how Arabic is written in practice. If you observed someone writing the sentence in question in real life, you could determine whether it was written in English or Arabic via whether it was written left to right or right to left. Now, it turns out that that's an observable property over email too; and that's as it should be. The alternative would be much worse. -- ais523
