On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 02:24:26PM -0500, David Starner wrote: > On 3/27/07, Rich Felker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 06:44:42PM -0500, David Starner wrote: > >> On 3/27/07, Rich Felker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >This is one of the very few > >places where a computer should ever perform case mappings: in a > >powerful editor or word processor > > Just about any program that deals with text is going to have a need to > merge distinctions that the user considers irrelevant, which often > includes case. I use grep -i, even when searching the output of my own > programs sometimes. I could go back and check the case I used in the > messages, but I'd rather let the tools do that.
This is not case mapping but equivalence classes. A completely different issue. Matching equivalence classes (including case and other equivalences) is trivial and mostly language-independent. Case mapping is ugly (think German “SS/ß”) and language-dependent (think Turkish “I/ı” and “İ/i”). > >Same thing. North American civilization is all European-derived. > > The civilization on North America, South America, Europe, Australia > and Antartica is European-derived, but I find it horribly hard to > dismiss something that's universal in five of the seven continents as > "disgustingly euro-centric". It’s not universal. It’s universal among the european-descended colonizers. In many of these places there are plenty of indigenous populations which do not use the colonizer’s script because it’s not suitable for their language, because the latin phonetic systems are designed for pompous linguists rather than based on the way people see their own languages. Often there is a colonial language (English, Spanish, French, etc.) alongside an indigenous language, and while the latter may often be written in latin letters, the orthography is often inconsistent and should be perceived as a “foreign” spelling system rather than something native. > >> In fact, I think you'd find that > >> most of the world's languages are written in scripts that have a > >> concept of case. > > > >This is a very dubious assertion. Technically it depends on how you > >measure "most" (language count vs speaker count... also the whole > >dialect vs language debate), but otherwise I think it's bogus. > > The English meaning of "Most of the world's languages" is the number > of languages. All of the languages spoken in North and South America, > with the exception of Cherokee and some Canadian languages written in > the UCAS, are written in Latin. All of the languages spoken in Africa, > with the exception of a few languages written in Ethiopian and Arabic, > are written in Latin. Written by whom? European-descended scholars who imposed a Latin alphabet for studying the language. Many of the speakers of many of these languages don’t even write the language at all.. I maintain that you have a very euro-centric-imperialist view of the world. It’s not to say that latin isn’t important or in widespread use, but pretending like latin is the pinnacle of importance and like frills for latin keep the world happy is something i find extremely annoying. Rich -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
