On 3/28/07, Rich Felker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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").
In Turkish, I and i should be in different equivalence classes, unlike in German. That's the main case where case mapping is language-dependent, so I don't see a huge difference here.
It's not universal. It's universal among the european-descended colonizers.
Humans aren't native to Europe; we're all Africa-descended colonizers, except for the Africans. Besides which, most of the descendants of the pre-Columbus inhabitants of the Americans now speak English, Spanish or Portuguese as their native tongue and write said language in the Latin script.
the orthography is often inconsistent and should be perceived as a "foreign" spelling system rather than something native.
Why? Orthography of English before the 1700s was inconsistent, and it was and is still occasionally inconsistent after that. Standardized orthography isn't found in many smaller language groups. Cherokee written in the Cherokee script doesn't have standardized orthography, despite that being an unquestionably native spelling system
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..
If they don't write the language, why are they a concern for the programming of a text handling application?
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.
I never said that Latin is the pinnacle of importance, nor that frills for Latin keep the world happy. I said the casing operation in Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic is relatively basic to the way people write their languages in those scripts, and that those scripts are very common among the general world and among the computer using population.
