Re:OT - people eaters - was: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Friday 18 September 2009 06:39:57 Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
A one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater?
{Which brings up the confusing question... Is the eater purple, or does
it eat purple people (which is why it is so rare... it only eats people
caught in the last stages of suffocation G)}
Snap (sort of).
Does anybody know where the concept of the purple people eater comes from?
I mean is there a children's book or something?
- Hendrik
Shep Wooley ( 1958 )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9H_cI_WCnE
--
Stanley C. Kitching
Human Being
Phoenix, Arizona
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Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
A one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater?
{Which brings up the confusing question... Is the eater purple, or does
it eat purple people (which is why it is so rare... it only eats people
caught in the last stages of suffocation G)}
Since we're spending so much time -- from the text (with Pythonic nested
quotes:)
'''I said Tell me Mister People Eater, what's your line?
He said Eatin' purple people, and it sure is fine.'''
Mel.
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Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
En Sun, 20 Sep 2009 03:33:47 -0300, Greg Ewing greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz escribió: Hendrik van Rooyen wrote: In any case, it doesn't affect my point, which was that I was thinking about something that I didn't have a word, or even a convenient phrase for. That is probably true, but on the other hand, it is not totally rubbish either, as it is hard to think of stuff you have never heard of, whether you have an undefined word for it or not. I quite agree that there is *some* interaction between the language we use and the way we think, but it's a two-way process. As a species, we're quite capable of thinking about new things and inventing words to express them when the need arises. It's possible that some individuals do this more frequently than others, e.g. mathematicians and other people who are in the habit of exploring new ideas may be less influenced by the constraints of language than the general population. Anyway, they're still constrained by the language. In ancient Greece many wise men made remarkable progress in geometry, arithmetic, and other areas - but could not develop algebra. Why not? Algebra requires abstract names for unknowns - x,y,z that we use today. The greek number system used letters to represent numbers themselves - α=1, β=2, etc. - so no one would think on using letters for designating unknown quantities; it was just out of their mental frame. Diophantus created some kind of algebra notation, so he was able to write x**n (for 2=n=6, basically combining the expressions for x² and x³) and could express some equations in short (or abridged) form, instead of the full prose that were used normally. But he was simply not able to develop symbolic algebra. And nothing happened for 15 centuries in this regard in Europe. The Arabians brought the Indian number system (and the idea of zero as a number) to Europe. And it's not a coincidence that Arabians also developed symbolic Algebra at the same time [2]; they *could* develop Algebra because they had a language into which symbolic names could be expressed. [1] Colerus, Egmont. Historia de la Matemática. De Pitágoras a Hilbert. Bs. As, Ediciones Progreso y Cultura, 1943 [2] BTW, the very name 'algebra' comes from a book of Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi, al-jabr w'al-muqabala. And guess where 'algorithm' comes from? -- Gabriel Genellina -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On 9/19/2009 11:33 PM Greg Ewing said... It's possible that some individuals do this more frequently than others, e.g. mathematicians and other people who are in the habit of exploring new ideas may be less influenced by the constraints of language than the general population. As I recall Shakespeare (to use one of his many spellings) is one of the largest contributers of new words to the English language... Emile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Hendrik van Rooyen wrote: Yikes! If I follow you, it is a bit like having a hollow dumb-bell with a hollow handle of zero length, and wanting a word for that opening between the knobs. That's pretty much it, yes. Although opening doesn't quite cut it, because there can be two of them sharing an edge with no physical substance in between, yet they are two distinct entities rather than a single opening. I do not think that you are likely to find a word in *any* language for that Probably not in any everyday language, no. It's a fairly abstract concept. But programming has a way of taking abstract concepts and turning them into concrete ones. I had this object in my data structure, and I needed a name for it. In any case, it doesn't affect my point, which was that I was thinking about something that I didn't have a word, or even a convenient phrase for. That is probably true, but on the other hand, it is not totally rubbish either, as it is hard to think of stuff you have never heard of, whether you have an undefined word for it or not. I quite agree that there is *some* interaction between the language we use and the way we think, but it's a two-way process. As a species, we're quite capable of thinking about new things and inventing words to express them when the need arises. It's possible that some individuals do this more frequently than others, e.g. mathematicians and other people who are in the habit of exploring new ideas may be less influenced by the constraints of language than the general population. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
2009/9/19 r rt8...@gmail.com: Snap (sort of). Does anybody know where the concept of the purple people eater comes from? I mean is there a children's book or something? - Hendrik I've always assumed it to go back to the 1958 Sheb Wooley song. Which I remember, although I was only 3 when it was released. -- Tim Rowe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
greg wrote: So in my humble opinion, the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bunk. :-) It also seems not to have been their hypothesis ;-). from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated an actual hypothesis, Lenneberg formulated one based on a condensation of the different expressions of the notion of linguistic relativity in their works. He found it necessary to formulate the hypothesis as two basic formulations which he called the weak and the strong formulation respectively: 1. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the language. 2. The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview he will acquire as he learns the language.[14] Since Lenneberg believed that the objective reality denotated by language was the same for speakers of all language he decided to test how different languages codified the same message differently and whether differences in codification could be proven to affect their behaviour. ...Lenneberg's two formulations of the hypothesis became widely known and attributed to Whorf and Sapir while in fact the second formulation, verging on linguistic determinism, was never advanced by either of them. In other words, the 'Strong' form is a strawman erected by someone somewhat opposed to their ideas. tjr -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 19, 2:12 am, greg g...@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz wrote: Hendrik van Rooyen wrote: there would be no way for a language to change and grow, if it were literally true that you cannot think of something that you have no word for. From my own experience, I know that it's possible for me to think about things that I don't have a word for. An example occured once when I was developing a 3D game engine, and I was trying to think of a name for the thing that exists where two convex polyhedra share a face, except that the face is missing (it's hard to explain even using multiple words). I couldn't think of any word that fully expressed the precise concept I had in mind. Yet I was clearly capable of thinking about it, otherwise I wouldn't have noticed that I was missing a word! So in my humble opinion, the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bunk. :-) -- Greg You have a good point here Greg! The break down in communication is a result of verbal language. What is verbal language? It *is* simply a way to reconstruct electrical signals from the senders brain to the receivers brain, that's it! One can easily grasp very complicated ideas (even abstract ideas) in ones mind in the flash of a nano second! However, reconstucting those same electrical signals and synapses in the mind of another human by means of *fancy* grunts-and-groans, is sometimes an exercise in asininity! You can think of natural language as exporting the state of program to file so program2 can parse the file and re-create the state of program1 within itself -- very inefficient and very, very ugly! All the hailer's of languages who make claims of natural language's beauty and elegance should give some real thought to the problems of human communication! Natural language is kludgy at best, and will NEVER be an elegant system! Hopefully i have help to successfully reconstruct this concept in your brain...? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Thursday 17 September 2009 15:29:38 Tim Rowe wrote: There are good reasons for it falling out of favour, though. At the time of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, anthropologists were arguing that members of a certain remote tribe did not experience grief on the death of a child because their language did not have a word for grief. They showed all the *signs* of grief -- weeping and wailing and so on -- and sometimes used metaphors (I feel as if my inside is being crushed). But because of the conviction at the time that if your language does not have a word for something, and you have never seen that object, then you __cannot__ think about it the anthropologists were convinced that this just looked and sounded like grief and wasn't actually grief. This is kind of convincing, when applied to an emotion like that. The whole thing is obviously a lot more complicated than the position I have taken here - if it weren't, then there would be no way for a language to change and grow, if it were literally true that you cannot think of something that you have no word for. By the way, at the moment I am thinking of a sort of purple blob-shaped monster with tentacles and fangs, that my language doesn't have a word for and that I have never seen. On your theory, how come I am thinking about it? I do not really believe you are thinking about a purple people eater. - you must be mistaken. :-) - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re:OT - people eaters - was: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Friday 18 September 2009 06:39:57 Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
A one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater?
{Which brings up the confusing question... Is the eater purple, or does
it eat purple people (which is why it is so rare... it only eats people
caught in the last stages of suffocation G)}
Snap (sort of).
Does anybody know where the concept of the purple people eater comes from?
I mean is there a children's book or something?
- Hendrik
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: OT - people eaters - was: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 3:26 AM, Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za wrote: Does anybody know where the concept of the purple people eater comes from? I mean is there a children's book or something? - Hendrik http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_People_Eater -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Friday 18 September 2009 06:39:57 Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: (snip) Snap (sort of). Does anybody know where the concept of the purple people eater comes from? I mean is there a children's book or something? - Hendrik Where is the one eyed, one horned, lavender (antiquated) language eater i ask! He would be a friend of mine for sure ;-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za wrote: The opposite thing is of course a continual source of trouble - we all have words for stuff we have never seen, like dragon, ghost, goblin, leprechaun, the current King of France, God, Allah, The Holy Trinity, Lucifer, Satan, Griffin - and because we have words for these things, we can, and unfortunately do, think about them, in a fuzzy fashion, to our own detriment. People even go around killing other people, based on such fuzzy thinking about stuff that can not be shown to exist. Okay class, this weekend's assignment is to read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and then return here on Monday to discuss :) (For someone who is not a linguist, Hendrik, you have a really solid grasp on the fundamentals of the field...) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
2009/9/15 Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za: On Monday 14 September 2009 14:06:36 Christopher Culver wrote: This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution. 1) Is an assumption, not a proven fact. falling out of favour is merely fashion amongst people who are dabbling in fuzzy areas where the hard discipline of the scientific method is inapplicable, because it is kind of hard to prove or disprove that my thinking and yours differ because my first language is different to yours. - we end up talking about our beliefs, after telling war stories. There are good reasons for it falling out of favour, though. At the time of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, anthropologists were arguing that members of a certain remote tribe did not experience grief on the death of a child because their language did not have a word for grief. They showed all the *signs* of grief -- weeping and wailing and so on -- and sometimes used metaphors (I feel as if my inside is being crushed). But because of the conviction at the time that if your language does not have a word for something, and you have never seen that object, then you __cannot__ think about it the anthropologists were convinced that this just looked and sounded like grief and wasn't actually grief. By the way, at the moment I am thinking of a sort of purple blob-shaped monster with tentacles and fangs, that my language doesn't have a word for and that I have never seen. On your theory, how come I am thinking about it? -- Tim Rowe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On 2009-09-15, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: Are you telling us people using a language that does not have a word for window somehow cannot comprehend what a window is, are you mad man? Words are simply text attributes attached to objects. the text attribute doesn't change the object in any way. just think of is __repr__ Err, no, it's a bit more complicated than that. Words map to material objects, to concepts, abstracta, sets, relations, states of affairs, to mental states, to different senses of the same object. What object is the word bachelor attached to? And why is it that suddenly the label - that's all it is, after all - stops being applicable after a person gets married. To use the classic example: The Morning Star is the Evening Star. The object is the same - Venus. But the sense in which the words are used are different: you wouldn't say that's the Evening Star! in the morning. If words are just dumb strings attached to objects, then someone saying The Morning Star is the Evening Star is saying no more than a = a. Your review of the Unicode standard is utterly naïve. There fact is that even if everyone we could wave a magic wand and ensure that everyone on the planet spoke the same language - English, for the sake of argument - that would not negate the need for using other character sets. A historian wants to typeset a book on ancient Greek civilization, where Greek characters are used interchangably with English characters. Here, having a uniform character set for all characters that one might feasibly want to use from all known civilizations from throughout history that it is practical to represent is superbly useful. Other areas of life use their own symbols, many of which are present in the Unicode specification including mathematical symbols, logic symbols, musical notes, IPA phonetic symbols, currency symbols, chess and playing card symbols, dingbats and much more. For basic typesetting, the Unicode standard also contains a variety of spaces, dashes and other typographical components which are not represented in Latin-1. The fact is that every language with characters in the Unicode standard generally have a large body of literature behind them - not necessarily literature like Shakespeare, but things which tell the story of a culture. How would you digitise those for search and study? Without the characters to represent those languages, you could say that it would be ideal to just translate them into the global language. Great. Do you trust the translators to do the job once and forever? Take any ancient text which still has relevance today for religion or culture or philosophy, and you'll find that anyone who *really* wants to understand it goes back to the original text in the original language. I'd really love to have some excellent language-to-language compilers that could, say, turn Ruby into Python into Java into C and vice versa. And do so reliably. Where are they? Show me perfect machine translation and then we can maybe stop bothering about other languages. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Mathematical_Operators -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 18, 2:39 pm, Dennis Lee Bieber wlfr...@ix.netcom.com wrote: Granted, a proper version would use a class where the two Venus objects have a different description... I think I'd be more inclined to model Venus and treat the others as views :) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
r wrote: On Sep 15, 4:12 am, Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za wrote: (snip) When a language lacks a word for a concept like window, then (I believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a person will do, growing up with only that language. Are you telling us people using a language that does not have a word for window somehow cannot comprehend what a window is, are you mad man? Words are simply text attributes attached to objects. the text attribute doesn't change the object in any way. just think of is __repr__ Without an outsider (read: someone who used a different language) who pointed out the idea of window; it is impossible for that person to think about the concept of window except in the cases of independent reinvention. This is because people are naturally lazy to think about difficult concepts; an opening on a plane is much more difficult to comprehend and express compared to window. Thus people either have to coin a new word for the complex concept or they won't be able to develop the concept since they don't benefit from the abstraction that the new word gives (think black-box thinking). I would say a word is like a new class. A class encapsulates a difficult concept into a much simpler wrapper so we don't have to think about how it is implementated. New concepts and ideas will be developed on top of these classes. Without the abstraction, we would have to use much elaboration to express the more complex concept; and we will fail to form conclusion earlier. And this brings out the point: though it is possible for any language to illustrate any concept; the concept will require much less brain cycle to comprehend in a fuller and richer language due to the wider availability of abstractions. Yes it is possible But no, it is not feasible for any mere to think about -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
r wrote: Not that I agree that it would be a Utopia, whatever the language - more like a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal experience that there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity would be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and progress would slow or stop. We already live in a Orwellian language nightmare. Have you seen much change to the English language in your lifetime? i haven't. A language must constantly evolve and trim the excess cruft that pollutes it. And English has a mountain of cruft! After all our years on this planet i think it's high time to perfect a simplified language for world-wide usage. /LOL/, /GTFW/. After /googling/ on /the web/ for some time, /AFAICT/ English still accumulates words such as /wtf/, /rofl/, or /pwned/. /FYI/, language doesn't rot, /OTOH/ our brains do. /:)/ /CU/ /l8r/ Just my /$.02/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
r wrote: You're on a slippery slope when you claim that people deserve whatever mistreatment or misfortune comes their way through mere circumstances of birth. I suggest you step back and actually read your messages again and consider how others might interpret them. Paul: civilizations rise and fall, this is beyond our control. Every great power will utter fail at some point. Some die out like a slow burning candle, others go quickly and painfully from defeating blows in war time. This is an eventuality you must face friend. This whole save the whales BS is really getting on my nerves! Stop trying to play God Paul, it is not your decision when and where the blade shall fall. When a people stop evolving and no longer have anything productive to give to evolution, evolution stamps them out. If the Indians had developed gun power and industrialized America they might be running more than merely a casino. Oh No! Was that out of line, you will probably think so. Ah.. Indian American is a good example. Since they had been so isolated from the rest of the world, their language, culture, and technology did not develop very well. An Orwellian nightmare of a single, unified language will more or less have the same effect as what geographical barrier did to the Indian American (and to other isolated cultures, e.g. Indigenous Australian, Papuan, Japanese (during the period of isolation), etc). And contradictory to your belief, some Indian American DID adopt gun powders when the white European come. And Europeans DID NOT develop gun powders, the Chinese did. The Chinese invented early rockets and early guns, and most importantly the gun powder itself. Before you convinced everyone to use the same natural language, you must convince everyone to use the same programming language. Nearly everyone have their natural language as their first language (mindset language); and nearly nobody have their favorite programming language as their mother tongue. It will be much easier to convince people to switch to a single, unified programming language since they don't have (or have much less) cultural ties and personal affection to the language. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: OT Language wars - was :An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Tuesday 15 September 2009 18:22:30 Christopher Culver wrote: Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za writes: 2) Is about as useful as stating that any Turing complete language and processor pair is capable of solving any computable problem, given enough time. So why are we not all programming in brainfuck? Except the amount of circumlocution one language might happen to use over another is quite limited. This is just an opinion, and it depends on the definition of limited. I have an example: Translate into English (from Afrikaans): Die kat hardloop onder die tafel deur. Literally, word for word, the sense of the words are: The cat runs under the table through. The Afrikaans conveys the meaning precisely and succinctly. I do not know of a simple way to convey the same meaning in English, to describe the action that takes place when a cat starts running well before one side of a table, dashes under it, and keeps running until it emerges at the opposite side, still running, and keeps running some more, in one smooth continuous burst of speed. When you say The cat runs under the table the English kind of implies that it goes there and tarries. Afrikaans would be Die kat hardloop onder die tafel in. ( in = in). Die kat hardloop onder die tafel uit. ( uit = out ).- Implies that the cat starts its run from under the table and leaves the shelter. The bare: Die kat hardloop onder die tafel. implies a crazy cat that stays under the table while continuously running. None of these concepts can, as far as I know, be succinctly stated in English, because English does not work like that - there is no room in the syntax for the addition of a spacial qualifier word that modifies the meaning of the sentence. (not talking about words here that modify the verb - like fast or slow - that is a different dimension) So if you think the circumlocution is quite limited, then your definition of limited is somehow different to mine. :-) 8 archeology - When a language lacks a word for a concept like window, then (I believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a person will do, growing up with only that language. Window goes back to an Anglo-Saxon compound windeye. Even if a word does not already exist in a given language for whatever novel item, the language is capable of creating from its own resources. I think what normally happens is that a foreign word is assimilated into the language, at the time the concept is encountered by the culture, as a result of contact with an outside influence - That, as far as I know, (from hearsay) is what happened in the case of window and the N'guni languages. It also happened in Afrikaans at the time of the invention of television. - from its own resources (a bunch of God fearing, hypocritical, rabid English haters) came the official word beeldradio - image radio (having successfully assimilated radio shortly before.) You hardly ever hear the erstwhile official word now. It has been almost totally displaced by televisie. No prizes for guessing where that came from. My opinion is that it is very difficult to avoid this borrowing when suddenly faced with a new thing. A language can only use its own resources to slowly evolve at its own pace. But then - I am probably wrong because I am not a linguist. - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Tuesday 15 September 2009 19:04:10 r wrote: On Sep 15, 4:12 am, Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za wrote: (snip) When a language lacks a word for a concept like window, then (I believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a person will do, growing up with only that language. Are you telling us people using a language that does not have a word for window somehow cannot comprehend what a window is, are you mad man? Words are simply text attributes attached to objects. the text attribute doesn't change the object in any way. just think of is __repr__ No - All I am asserting, is the unfashionable view that your first language forms the way you think. It goes deeper than the simple vocabulary problem you are describing, even though that is serious enough. I still assert that if your language does not have a word for something, and you have never seen that object, then you __cannot__ think about it, because you do not have the tools in your kitbag that you need to do so. - no word, no concept, the empty set. And I would even assert that, when you meet the object, and acquire a word for it, it is painful for you to think about it, because it is a new thing for you. You then have to go through a painful process of integrating that new thing into your world view, before you are able to use and reference it easily. - did, for instance, the concept of an abstract class just jump into your head, and stick there immediately, complete with all its ramifications, in the minute immediately after hearing about it for the first time? Or did you need a bit of time to understand it and get comfortable? And were you able to, and did you, think about it before hearing of it? If you answer those questions honestly, you will catch my drift. The opposite thing is of course a continual source of trouble - we all have words for stuff we have never seen, like dragon, ghost, goblin, leprechaun, the current King of France, God, Allah, The Holy Trinity, Lucifer, Satan, Griffin - and because we have words for these things, we can, and unfortunately do, think about them, in a fuzzy fashion, to our own detriment. People even go around killing other people, based on such fuzzy thinking about stuff that can not be shown to exist. - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Lie Ryan wrote: r wrote: On Sep 15, 4:12 am, Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za wrote: (snip) When a language lacks a word for a concept like window, then (I believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a person will do, growing up with only that language. Are you telling us people using a language that does not have a word for window somehow cannot comprehend what a window is, are you mad man? Words are simply text attributes attached to objects. the text attribute doesn't change the object in any way. just think of is __repr__ Without an outsider (read: someone who used a different language) who pointed out the idea of window; it is impossible for that person to think about the concept of window except in the cases of independent reinvention. This is because people are naturally lazy to think about difficult concepts; an opening on a plane is much more difficult to comprehend and express compared to window. Thus people either have to coin a new word for the complex concept or they won't be able to develop the concept since they don't benefit from the abstraction that the new word gives (think black-box thinking). A window in a plane is an opening which isn't open as such! :-) I would say a word is like a new class. A class encapsulates a difficult concept into a much simpler wrapper so we don't have to think about how it is implementated. New concepts and ideas will be developed on top of these classes. Without the abstraction, we would have to use much elaboration to express the more complex concept; and we will fail to form conclusion earlier. And this brings out the point: though it is possible for any language to illustrate any concept; the concept will require much less brain cycle to comprehend in a fuller and richer language due to the wider availability of abstractions. Yes it is possible But no, it is not feasible for any mere to think about -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Robin Becker ro...@reportlab.com writes: well allegedly, the medium is the message so we also need to take account of language in addition to the meaning of communications. I don't believe all languages are equivalent in the meanings that they can encode or convey. Our mathematics is heavily biassed towards continuous differential systems and as a result we end up with many physical theories that have smooth equilibrium descriptions, we may literally be unable to get at other theories of the physical world because our languages fall short. This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 14, 1:24 pm, Terry Reedy tjre...@udel.edu wrote: r wrote: So how many letters do we need? 50, 100, 1000? From Wikipedia IPA article: Occasionally symbols are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of 2008, there are 107 distinct letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosody marks in the IPA proper. HaHa! and here is my favorite paragraph from that article.. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are distinctive in spoken language: phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables.[1] To represent additional qualities of speech such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft palate, an extended set of symbols called the Extensions to the IPA is used.[2] LOL! (a smilie just would not have sufficed!) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Monday 14 September 2009 14:06:36 Christopher Culver wrote: This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution. 1) Is an assumption, not a proven fact. falling out of favour is merely fashion amongst people who are dabbling in fuzzy areas where the hard discipline of the scientific method is inapplicable, because it is kind of hard to prove or disprove that my thinking and yours differ because my first language is different to yours. - we end up talking about our beliefs, after telling war stories. 2) Is about as useful as stating that any Turing complete language and processor pair is capable of solving any computable problem, given enough time. So why are we not all programming in brainfuck? Or speaking the language of the people who wrote linear B? When a language lacks a word for a concept like window, then (I believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a person will do, growing up with only that language. - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za writes: 2) Is about as useful as stating that any Turing complete language and processor pair is capable of solving any computable problem, given enough time. So why are we not all programming in brainfuck? Except the amount of circumlocution one language might happen to use over another is quite limited. Or speaking the language of the people who wrote linear B? You mean Mycenaean Greek? There's still a few million people in Europe who speak a descendent of that very language. When a language lacks a word for a concept like window, then (I believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a person will do, growing up with only that language. Window goes back to an Anglo-Saxon compound windeye. Even if a word does not already exist in a given language for whatever novel item, the language is capable of creating from its own resources. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 14, 5:05 am, Christopher Culver crcul...@christopherculver.com wrote: Hyuga hyugaricd...@gmail.com writes: I just wanted to add, in defense of the Chinese written language ... that I think it would make a fairly good candidate for use at least as a universal *written* language. Particularly simplified Chinese since, well, it's simpler. The advantages are that the grammar is relatively simple, and it can be used to illustrate concepts independently of the writer's spoken language. Musings about the universality of the Chinese writing system, once so common among Western thinkers, nevertheless do not square with reality. The Chinese writing system is in fact deeply linked to the Chinese language, even to the specific dialect being spoken. See Defrancis' _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_ (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984): http://preview.tinyurl.com/rbyuuk Oh, certainly! I thought I said as much in my original post, but maybe I didn't stress that enough. I'm a lot stronger in Japanese than I am in Chinese, but even Japanese uses various Chinese characters in ways that have deep cultural ties that may not translate well (and in many cases that are completely different from those characters' implications in any Chinese language). I guess the reason I didn't stress that enough is that I'm in no way implying that they be used as is. I just think they could be taken as the basis for a standardized universal written language. One might argue that it would make more sense to come up with a new character set for that, but here we have one that so many people are already familiar with in some form or another. And the radical system makes them much easier to remember than many people realize. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 15, 4:12 am, Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za wrote: (snip) When a language lacks a word for a concept like window, then (I believe :-) ), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a person will do, growing up with only that language. Are you telling us people using a language that does not have a word for window somehow cannot comprehend what a window is, are you mad man? Words are simply text attributes attached to objects. the text attribute doesn't change the object in any way. just think of is __repr__ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Christopher Culver wrote: Robin Becker ro...@reportlab.com writes: well allegedly, the medium is the message so we also need to take account of language in addition to the meaning of communications. I don't believe all languages are equivalent in the meanings that they can encode or convey. Our mathematics is heavily biassed towards continuous differential systems and as a result we end up with many physical theories that have smooth equilibrium descriptions, we may literally be unable to get at other theories of the physical world because our languages fall short. This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution. This is the old Lenneberg-Chomsky Universalist hypothesis, which has fallen out of favor among cognitive scientists and others as various researchers have done actual experiments to determine how and when language does and does not influence perception and thought. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Hyuga hyugaricd...@gmail.com writes: I just wanted to add, in defense of the Chinese written language ... that I think it would make a fairly good candidate for use at least as a universal *written* language. Particularly simplified Chinese since, well, it's simpler. The advantages are that the grammar is relatively simple, and it can be used to illustrate concepts independently of the writer's spoken language. Musings about the universality of the Chinese writing system, once so common among Western thinkers, nevertheless do not square with reality. The Chinese writing system is in fact deeply linked to the Chinese language, even to the specific dialect being spoken. See Defrancis' _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_ (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984): http://preview.tinyurl.com/rbyuuk -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
r wrote: ... What makes you think that diversity is lost with a single language? I say more pollination will occur and the seed will be more potent since all parties will contribute to the same pool. Sure there will be idioms of different regions but that is to be expected. But at least then i could make international crank calls without the language barrier ;-) well allegedly, the medium is the message so we also need to take account of language in addition to the meaning of communications. I don't believe all languages are equivalent in the meanings that they can encode or convey. Our mathematics is heavily biassed towards continuous differential systems and as a result we end up with many physical theories that have smooth equilibrium descriptions, we may literally be unable to get at other theories of the physical world because our languages fall short. -- Robin Becker -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 14, 6:06 am, Christopher Culver crcul...@christopherculver.com wrote: Robin Becker ro...@reportlab.com writes: well allegedly, the medium is the message so we also need to take account of language in addition to the meaning of communications. I don't believe all languages are equivalent in the meanings that they can encode or convey. Our mathematics is heavily biassed towards continuous differential systems and as a result we end up with many physical theories that have smooth equilibrium descriptions, we may literally be unable to get at other theories of the physical world because our languages fall short. This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution. Fashion changes in science as well as clothes. :-) I wouldn't count Sapir-Whorf out yet... http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 30, 2:19 pm, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: On Aug 29, 11:05 pm, Anny Mous b1540...@tyldd.com wrote: (snip) How do we distinguish resume from résumé without accents? This is another quirk of some languages that befuddles me. What is with the ongoing language pronunciation tutorial some languages have turned into -- French is a good example (*puke*). Do you *really* need those squiggly lines and cues above letters so you won't forget how to pronounce a word. Pure ridiculousness! Even when we succeed in banning all languages that can't be written using A-Z, what do we do about the vast number of legacy documents? How do we write about obsolete English letters like Ð and Þ without Unicode? Who gives a fig about obsolete languages, thank god they are dead and let's move on!! Some may say well how can we possibly force countries/people to speak/ code in a uniform manner? Well that's simple, you just stop supporting their cryptic languages by dumping Unicode and returning to the beautiful ASCII and adopting English as the universal world language. Why English? Well because it is so widely spoken. World population: 6.7 billion Number of native Mandarin speakers: 873 million Number of native Hindi speakers: 370 million Number of native Spanish speakers: 350 million Number of native English speakers: 340 million Total number of Mandarin speakers: 1051 million Total number of English speakers: 510 million http://www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm I was actually referring to countries where the majority of people *actually* know what a computer is and how to use it... If there culture has not caught up with western technology yet they are doomed to the fate of native American Indians. Whichever way you look at it, we should all convert to Mandarin, not English. Looks like we still need Unicode. see my last comment (snip entertaining assumptions) Yes, because language differences have utterly destroyed us so many times in the past! Have you thought about the difference between China, with one culture and one spoken language for thousands of years, and Europe, with dozens of competing cultures, competing governments, and alternate languages for just as long? If multiple languages are so harmful, why was it the British, French, Japanese, Russians, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians and Americans who were occupying China during the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, instead of the other way around? Strength comes from diversity, not monoculture. No strength comes from superior firepower. The Chinese culture stop evolving thousands of years ago. Who invented gun powder? Yes the Chinese and all they could do with it was create fireworks. Europeans took gun powered and started a revolution that changes the world forever -- for better and for worse, but that is how advancements work. It wasn't until western influence came along and finally nudged china into the 21st century. Europeans seek out technology and aren't dragged down by an antiquated culture which is good for innovation. If China with it's huge population thought like a European, they would rule the earth for 10,000 years. Well, I am from one of the non-English speaking countries (Czech Republic). We were always messed up with windows-1250 or iso-8859-2. Unicode is really great thing for us and for our developers. About the western technology made in China and Taiwan... do you really think US are so modern? I can only recommend you to visit Japan :). I also think 26 letters are really limited and English is one of the most limited languages ever. It has too strict syntax. Yeah, it is easy to learn, but not so cool to hear every day. Btw how many foreign languages do you speak? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
ru...@yahoo.com wrote: On Sep 14, 6:06 am, Christopher Culver crcul...@christopherculver.com wrote: Robin Becker ro...@reportlab.com writes: well allegedly, the medium is the message so we also need to take account of language in addition to the meaning of communications. I don't believe all languages are equivalent in the meanings that they can encode or convey. Our mathematics is heavily biassed towards continuous differential systems and as a result we end up with many physical theories that have smooth equilibrium descriptions, we may literally be unable to get at other theories of the physical world because our languages fall short. This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution. Fashion changes in science as well as clothes. :-) I wouldn't count Sapir-Whorf out yet... http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html very nice link, thanks. -- Robin Becker -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
ru...@yahoo.com writes: Fashion changes in science as well as clothes. :-) A favourite line of crackpots who think that their ridiculous position is not held by others merely because of fashion. I wouldn't count Sapir-Whorf out yet... http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html That researcher does not say that language *constrains* thought, which was the assertion of the OP and of the strict form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. She merely says that it may influence thought. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 14, 6:00 am, Robin Becker ro...@reportlab.com wrote: (snip) well allegedly, the medium is the message so we also need to take account of language in addition to the meaning of communications. I don't believe all languages are equivalent in the meanings that they can encode or convey. Our mathematics is heavily biassed towards continuous differential systems and as a result we end up with many physical theories that have smooth equilibrium descriptions, we may literally be unable to get at other theories of the physical world because our languages fall short. -- Robin Becker Intelligence does not depend on outside resources (languages), intelligence begets new intelligent resources! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 14, 9:05 am, Mel mwil...@the-wire.com wrote: (snip) Worf was raised as a Klingon, so you can expect this. If he'd been brought up speaking Minbari, points 1 and 2 would have been obvious to him. Mel. Yes Klingon's are a product of their moronic society, not their moronic language. The brainwashing starts at home! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 14, 9:11 am, Processor-Dev1l processor.de...@gmail.com wrote: (snip) Well, I am from one of the non-English speaking countries (Czech Republic). We were always messed up with windows-1250 or iso-8859-2. Unicode is really great thing for us and for our developers. Yes you need the crutch of Unicode because no all-encompassing- language exists today. Because of this we need interpretors at accident scenes, and subtitles on movies. Public Warning Systems must be delayed due to repeating the same information in different languages. And the worst part of all of this is the human instinct to fear that which is different. Yes, multi-languages contribute to racism and classism although are not the only cause. What moronicity is this when a self-aware species has evolved for as long as we and yet, has not perfected universal communication, sad, very sad! What would an advanced civilization think if they dropped in for a spot of tea? About the western technology made in China and Taiwan... do you really think US are so modern? I can only recommend you to visit Japan :). The US is nearing the end of it's global reign and superpower status. Is that a good or bad thing? Only time shall tell! Doesn't matter really because some other power will step in and be the hated one, it's very lonely at the top -- i myself know this fact all to well ;-) I also think 26 letters are really limited and English is one of the most limited languages ever. It has too strict syntax. Yeah, it is easy to learn, but not so cool to hear every day. So how many letters do we need? 50, 100, 1000? Simplisticity is elegance, that is why Python is so beautiful! Yes, English sucks eggs and if we do adopt it as universal language, it should get an enema for sure. But i am all for scraping the English language all together and creating something completely new. Btw how many foreign languages do you speak? I guess you judge intelligence from memorization of redundant facts? Some people believe this, however i don't. I have gb's and gb's on my hard drive for storing redundant facts. I use my mind for dreaming, reasoning, contemplating, exploring, etc, not as a refuse bin! As i said before language is nothing more than a utility, a way to communicate with others. You can romanticize it all you want but at the end of the day it is nothing more than what it is. People who romanticize language typically like Shakespeare and such. I have no interest in flower sniffing pansies from days gone by. My interest are science, technology, and the advancement of human intelligence. I leave Saturday morning cartoons for children. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 14, 9:23 am, Christopher Culver crcul...@christopherculver.com wrote: (snip) That researcher does not say that language *constrains* thought, which was the assertion of the OP and of the strict form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. She merely says that it may influence thought. *I* am the OP! I never said language constrained thought or intelligence, that's lunacy! That would be akin to saying class status decides intelligence! You should reread this thread immediately! My argument is multi-languages and the loss of communication, and obviously we have before us an example of this miss-communication. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
r wrote: So how many letters do we need? 50, 100, 1000? From Wikipedia IPA article: Occasionally symbols are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of 2008, there are 107 distinct letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosody marks in the IPA proper. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:24:44 +0100, Terry Reedy tjre...@udel.edu wrote: r wrote: So how many letters do we need? 50, 100, 1000? From Wikipedia IPA article: Occasionally symbols are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of 2008, there are 107 distinct letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosody marks in the IPA proper. The biggest problem for the IPA is that vowels are a two-dimensional continuum, which is hard to map with discrete symbols. Worse, differing vowel sounds are the big variable in regional accents. There's basically too much variation within the dialectal family of English to make an attempt to render it phonetically much use. -- Rhodri James *-* Wildebeest Herder to the Masses -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 10, 8:43 pm, Jan Claeys use...@janc.be wrote:
Maybe we should use a language that has a Turing-complete grammar, so
that even computers can understand speak it easily?
Interesting, i do find some things more easily explainable using code,
however, code losses the ability to describe abstract ideas and such.
But you have piqued my interest...?
--
def get_enlightened():
import webbrowser
webbrowser.open('http://jjsenlightenments.blogspot.com/')
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Op Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:28:55 -0700, schreef r: I said it before and i will say it again. I DONT CARE WHAT LANGUAGE WE USE AS LONG AS IT IS A MODERN LANGUAGE FOUNDED ON IDEALS OF SIMPLICITY Maybe we should use a language that has a Turing-complete grammar, so that even computers can understand speak it easily? http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Panini:scholar.htm (with thanks to Anna Ravenscroft for pointing me to this some time ago) When used by everyone, it would allow us to write programs in the language all of us speak... *Maybe*... :P -- JanC -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Tue, Sep 01, 2009 at 03:16:03PM EDT, r wrote: [..] Bring on the metric system Terry, i have been waiting all my life!! Now, if we can only convince those 800 million Mandarin Chinese speakers... *ahem* Do we have a Chinese translator in the house? :-) Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow And further on.. This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men The very worst about you rant is that you may be the harbinger, a sign of things to come. A loud steady voice told him that By this as your standard, you will conquer. 'nuff said.. have a good night. CJ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 1, 9:48 am, steve st...@lonetwin.net wrote: (snip) I think you are confusing simplicity with uniformity. Uniformity is not always good. Sure standardizing on units of measure and airline codes is good, but expecting everyone to speak one language is akin to expecting everyone to wear one type of clothing or expecting everyone to drive just one type of automobile -- those kind of rules works well in a small sets where doing so fulfills a purpose (in the army, hospitals or taxi service, for instance). Thanks for bringing good arguments to this thread. But let me argue your talking points a bit. You seem to think that a single language somehow infringes upon the freedoms of individuals and you argue this by making parallels to personal taste's like like cars, clothing, hairstyles, etc. I am an American so i deeply believe in the right of individuals to freedom of speech, freedom of expression. Freedom of everything AS long as your freedoms don't cancel-out others freedoms. I am also not advocating the outlawing or frowning upon of any non- official language, quite the contrary. I AM saying that there must be *ONE* language that is taught in schools throughout the world as the very first language a child and *ONE* language that is used for official business of governments and corporations throughout the world. HOWEVER, individuals will still have the freedom to speak/write/ curse in any other language their heart desires. But with the great language unity, all peoples will be able to communicate fluently through the universal language while keeping their cultural identity. Can you not see the beauty in this system? Like i said, i believe in individual freedom, but you and i are also children of the Human race. There are some responsibilities we must keep to Human-kind as a whole. Universal communication is one of them. Universal freedom is another. An neither of these responsibilities will hold back individualism. To put it another way, it is better to create data structures to deal with variable length names rather than mandating that everybody has names 30 chars. You need to understand that language is for communication and expression of ideas, and that is it. It is really not as glamorous as you make it seem. It is simple a utility and nothing more... This might come as a bit of shock for you, but evolution awards those who are capable of adapting to complexity rather then those who expect things to be uniform. You, dear friend, and those who yearn for uniformity are the ones on the path to extinction. No evolution awards those that benefit evolution. You make it seem as evolution is some loving mother hen, quite the contrary! Evolution is selfish, greedy, and sometimes evil. And it will endure all of us... remember the old cliche Nice guys finish last? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
En Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:49:57 -0300, r rt8...@gmail.com escribió: On Sep 1, 1:52 pm, Hyuga hyugaricd...@gmail.com wrote: (snip) I'd say don't feel the troll, but too late for that I guess. The only trolls in this thread are you and the others who breaks into MY THREAD just for the knee-jerk reaction of troll calling! Even though you *did* offer some argument to one of the subjects of this thread, it was cancelled out by your trolling! Bueno, voy a escribir en el segundo lenguaje más hablado en el mundo (español), después del mandarín (con más de 1000 millones de personas). El inglés está recién en el tercer puesto, con menos de la mitad de hablantes (500 millones). Si no me entendés, jodete. Fuente: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=languages+in+the+world -- Gabriel Genellina -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Wednesday 02 September 2009 08:52:55 Gabriel Genellina wrote: En Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:49:57 -0300, r rt8...@gmail.com escribió: On Sep 1, 1:52 pm, Hyuga hyugaricd...@gmail.com wrote: (snip) I'd say don't feel the troll, but too late for that I guess. The only trolls in this thread are you and the others who breaks into MY THREAD just for the knee-jerk reaction of troll calling! Even though you *did* offer some argument to one of the subjects of this thread, it was cancelled out by your trolling! Bueno, voy a escribir en el segundo lenguaje más hablado en el mundo (español), después del mandarín (con más de 1000 millones de personas). El inglés está recién en el tercer puesto, con menos de la mitad de hablantes (500 millones). Si no me entendés, jodete. Fuente: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=languages+in+the+world What do you call someone who speaks three languages? - trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks two languages? - bilingual. What do you call someone who only speaks one language? - A stupid gringo! Nice one Gabriel - and with a link too! Looks like I am going to have to learn some Castilian, or something. :-) - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
[OT] evolution [was Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard]
This thread has intrigued me enough to bite the bullet and look up r's posts. Oh my! They say a little learning is a dangerous thing, and this is a great example -- the only think bigger than r's ignorance and naivety on these topics is his confidence that he alone understands The Truth. Oh well, we were all kiddies like that once, so absolutely sure of ourselves on the basis of the most shallow paddling around on the shore of the sea of knowledge. I will limit myself to commenting on only one thing. (A good thing too, because this is long enough as it is.) On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:39:43 -0700, r wrote, quoting Steve (no relation st...@lonetwin.net: This might come as a bit of shock for you, but evolution awards those who are capable of adapting to complexity rather then those who expect things to be uniform. You, dear friend, and those who yearn for uniformity are the ones on the path to extinction. No evolution awards those that benefit evolution. You make it seem as evolution is some loving mother hen, quite the contrary! Evolution is selfish, greedy, and sometimes evil. And it will endure all of us... remember the old cliche Nice guys finish last? This is Not Even Wrong. Evolution isn't a *thing*, it is a *process*. Nothing exists to benefit evolution, that's like saying that horses have long legs to benefit running or people have lungs to benefit breathing. Horses have long legs so *they* can run, which is beneficial to *them* (but not earthworms, oak trees, eagles or sharks) because it enables them, indirectly, to survive long enough to produce offspring which are more likely to survive than they otherwise would be. Horses aren't the mechanism for running to make more running. Running is one of the ways horses survive long enough to make more horses. R is utterly confused if he thinks species live or die according to because they're benefiting evolution. Species live or die according to whether or not they reproduce, not due to services rendered to a process. Suggesting that species exist for the benefit of evolution is backwards -- it is like saying that we have computers and light bulbs and televisions and DVD players so that electricity can run through wires. Or that we build cars for the benefit of combustion. (This sort of nonsense, anthropomorphizing the process of evolution, seems to be unique to those on the right-wing of politics. Go figure.) Steve (the other Steve) is right -- species which are incapable of dealing with the complexity and dynamism of the world are doomed to extinction. Biologists have a word for stasis: dead. The most vigorous, lively ecosystems are those that are complex, like rain forests (what used to be called jungles when I was a lad), coral reefs and mangroves. Messy, complicated, complex ecosystems are successful because they are resilient to damage -- a plague comes along and even if it kills off every individual of one species of fruit, there are a thousand different species unharmed. The sort of monoculture which r sings the praises of are fragile and brittle. Look at the Cavendish banana, nearly extinct because a disease is wiping the plants out, and there's not enough genetic variability in it to survive. (Fortunately there are dozens of varieties of bananas, so when the Cavendish becomes extinct, we'll still have bananas.) Or the Irish Potato Famine: millions of Irish dead from famine because 90% of their food intake came from a *single* source, potatoes, which in turn came from not just a single variety but just a handful of closely related individuals. (Well, also because the English were brutish thugs during the famine too, but that's just politics.) As for the idea nice guys finish last, that's a ridiculous over- simplification. Vampire bats share their food with other vampire bats who otherwise would be hungry. Remoras stick to sharks, who carry them around for years without eating them. There's those little birds which climb into the mouths of crocodiles to clean their teeth while the crocodile sits patiently with it's mouth wide open. Wolves and wild dogs and hyenas hunt cooperatively. Baboons and chimpanzees form alliances. Penguins huddle together through the freezing months of darkness, and although the winds are so cold that the penguins on the outside would freeze to death, few of them do, because they all take their share of time in the centre. Monkeys cry out warnings when they see a leopard or a hawk, even though it puts them personally at risk. Meercats post sentries, who expose themselves to danger to protect the rest of the colony. And the most successful mammal on the planet, more successful than any other large animal, is also the most cooperative, least selfish species around. It is so unselfish, so cooperative, that individuals will rush into burning buildings to save complete strangers, and that cooperation has let the species colonize the entire planet and even
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
En Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:58:43 -0300, Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za escribió: On Wednesday 02 September 2009 08:52:55 Gabriel Genellina wrote: Bueno, voy a escribir en el segundo lenguaje más hablado en el mundo (español), después del mandarín (con más de 1000 millones de personas). What do you call someone who speaks three languages? - trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks two languages? - bilingual. What do you call someone who only speaks one language? - A stupid gringo! LOL! Nice one Gabriel - and with a link too! Looks like I am going to have to learn some Castilian, or something. :-) Looks like we all will have to learn mandarin! A nice language but with a high entrance barrier for western people. -- Gabriel Genellina -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Gabriel Genellina wrote: Looks like we all will have to learn mandarin! A nice language but with a high entrance barrier for western people. It will pay off in the long run. Problem for me: it seems most people in Toronto speak Cantonese. That's just something I'll have to deal with. Wrote a little 3-in-a-row game to get familiar with Chinese characters. Astonished at how Chinese-ready Python 2.5 already is. Collecting characters from web sites and pasting them in to literals in the program source just works. Mel. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: evolution [was Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard]
On Sep 2, 4:41 am, Steven D'Aprano ste...@remove.this.cybersource.com.au wrote: (snip) No evolution awards those that benefit evolution. You make it seem as evolution is some loving mother hen, quite the contrary! Evolution is selfish, greedy, and sometimes evil. And it will endure all of us... remember the old cliche Nice guys finish last? This is Not Even Wrong. Evolution isn't a *thing*, it is a *process*. Nothing exists to benefit evolution, that's like saying that horses have long legs to benefit running or people have lungs to benefit breathing. Well horses do have long and well evolved legs for running and humans lungs for breathing, and they have them because it benefits them which in turn benefits evolution. the buck stops with evolution. R is utterly confused if he thinks species live or die according to because they're benefiting evolution. Species live or die according to whether or not they reproduce, Dear God i hate the current progress of evolution if reproduction guaranteed survival. I think it is just a wee bit more complicated than that Steven. *wink* (This sort of nonsense, anthropomorphizing the process of evolution, seems to be unique to those on the right-wing of politics. Go figure.) Uh? let's not go there. Leave politics corrupting influence out of this. Steve (the other Steve) is right -- species which are incapable of dealing with the complexity and dynamism of the world are doomed to extinction. Biologists have a word for stasis: dead. The most vigorous, lively ecosystems are those that are complex, like rain forests (what used to be called jungles when I was a lad), coral reefs and mangroves. Messy, complicated, complex ecosystems are successful because they are resilient to damage -- a plague comes along and even if it kills off every individual of one species of fruit, there are a thousand different species unharmed. The sort of monoculture which r sings the praises of are fragile and brittle. Look at the Cavendish banana, nearly extinct because a disease is wiping the plants out, and there's not enough genetic variability in it to survive. (Fortunately there are dozens of varieties of bananas, so when the Cavendish becomes extinct, we'll still have bananas.) You cannot draw parallels between bio diversity and language diversity. Bio diversity is fundamental to all species survival, even a virus. I am quite sure that the adoption of Universal World language will not usher in the apocalypse for human kind, quite the contrary! Ok a Jew, a Catholic Priest and a Chinese man walk into a bar Now if the bar suddenly catches fire and only one of them notices, how should this person convey the danger to the others. Well he could jump- up-and-down-yelling-oh!-oh!-oh!-with-arms-failing-in-the-air, but i think human evolution has presented a far more elegant way to communicate than that of the chimpanzee. Or the Irish Potato Famine: millions of Irish dead from famine because 90% of their food intake came from a *single* source, potatoes, which in turn came from not just a single variety but just a handful of closely related individuals. OMG! human kind will be utterly wiped out by the universal language. Somebody please jump-up-and-down-with-flailing-arms we must warn everyone of this impending doom before it is too late! /chicken little (snip: more political innuendo) As for the idea nice guys finish last, that's a ridiculous over- simplification. Vampire bats share their food with other vampire bats who otherwise would be hungry. ...could be they are fatting them up for the kill! Remoras stick to sharks, who carry them around for years without eating them. ...Well yes sharks share a personality trait with cab drivers but...? And i wonder if they really *know* they are back there? Sharks aren't exactly evolutions shining jewel. There's those little birds which climb into the mouths of crocodiles to clean their teeth while the crocodile sits patiently with it's mouth wide open. ...Hmm, i have thought about clamping down hard while my dentist pokes around with his fingers in there. But who then would clean my teeth? And it could be that those crocs are just slightly vain? Wolves and wild dogs and hyenas hunt cooperatively. Baboons and chimpanzees form alliances. Penguins huddle together through the freezing months of darkness, and although the winds are so cold that the penguins on the outside would freeze to death, few of them do, because they all take their share of time in the centre. ...birds of a feather flock together! Monkeys cry out warnings when they see a leopard or a hawk, even though it puts them personally at risk. Meercats post sentries, who expose themselves to danger to protect the rest of the colony. ...they could be expendable to the community! And the most successful mammal on the planet, more successful than any other large animal, is also the most cooperative, least selfish species
Re: evolution [was Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard]
r wrote: I'd like to present a bug report to evolution, obviously the garbage collector is malfunctioning. I think most people think that when they read the drivel that you generate. I'm done with your threads and posts. *plonk* -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Nigel Rantor wig...@wiggly.org writes: Hendrik van Rooyen wrote: On Sunday 30 August 2009 22:46:49 Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: Rather elitist viewpoint... Why don't we just drop nukes on some 60% of populated landmasses that don't have a western culture and avoid the whole problem? Now yer talking, boyo! It will surely help with the basic problem which is the heavy infestation of people on the planet! :-) bait On two conditions: 1) We drop some test bombs on Slough to satisfy Betjeman. 2) We strap both Xah and r to aforementioned bombs. /bait switch Also, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Esperanto yet. Sounds like something r and Xah would *love*. Slightly off-topic - does anyone have a good recipe for getting thunderbird to kill whole threads for good? Either based on a rule or just some extension I can use? The Xah/r threads are like car crashes, I can't help but watch but my time could be better spent and I don't want to unsub the whole list. /switch Please do not insult Xah. He spoke nothing in this threads. -- After the divorce I gave Ginny and the kids more than the courts said I should. -- Johnny Fontane, Chapter 1, page 36 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Well despite all my rantings over Unicode i highly doubt Guido will remove it from Python or any other language devs will follow suit. As i pointed out the real issue is not so much a Unicode problem (which is just a monkey patch) but stems from the multi-language problem. I think a correlation can be drawn between the current state of the world now, and the state of programming *pre* OOP. A lot of duplicate natural languages are spread out every where like some noob's spaghetti code. There is no intelligent all encompassing system to reign in this unorganization. We need an intelligent object model (universal language) to reign in this madness. We must wrap up the loose ends here so we can spend more time on real problems and less time on the remedial work of duplicating code (leaning multi-lang's) and debugging code (miscommunication and misunderstandings between multi-lang users). How many countless years are wasted on humans learning multiple languages just so we can communicate? How many advancements in medicine, physics, mathematics, blah, are we pushing further down the road due to wasted time and energy? But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units of measure, etc. Until this multiplicity is reigned in, programmers will suffer the agony of Unicode. Travelers to foreign lands will need to exchange their monies And yes, *even* mechanic's will need to carry around a set of metric and standard wrenches in their toolboxes. What a shame :-( -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
r wrote: Well despite all my rantings over Unicode i highly doubt Guido will remove it from Python or any other language devs will follow suit. As i pointed out the real issue is not so much a Unicode problem (which is just a monkey patch) but stems from the multi-language problem. Unicode is a symptom, not a fundamental cause. [snip] But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units of measure, etc. There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English as a common language. tjr -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Am 01.09.2009 um 09:39 schrieb Terry Reedy: But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units of measure, etc. There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English as a common language. The SI-system is nearly universally employed. Three principal exceptions are Burma (Myanmar), Liberia, and the United States. The United Kingdom has officially adopted the International System of Units but not with the intention of replacing customary measures entirely. inline: Bild 4.png When I was a student, they told us, that in a couple of years there will be the SI-system only, because most countries accepted it in their laws. So we should adopt it. That was in the early 70ties. Only this year we have to deliver results of technical processes to british and US companies. They still want them in their crazy outdated units. The other thing would be the US to adopt a simplified basic English. I would not be astonished, that british people would state, that they already do :-) Grüessli-- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On 30 Aug, 18:00, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: Hold the phone Paul you are calling me a retarded bigot and i don't much appreciate that. I think you are completely misinterpreting my post. i and i ask you read it again especially this part... I didn't call you a retarded bigot, and yet I did read your post. [...] I don't really care what language we adopt as long as we choose *only* one and then seek to perfect it to perfection. And also that this *one* language use simplicity as it's model. English sucks, but compared to traditional Chinese and Egyptian Hieroglyphs it's a god send. You don't care which language it is as long as it's the one you use. That's what this sounds like, layered on top of what you've already written (and what you write below). How about Esperanto? You have heard of Esperanto, right? Or take your pick from the other artificial languages - they're relatively popular in some places where English isn't the natural first-choice foreign language. [...] Look history is great but i am more concerned with the future. Learn the lessons of the past, move on, and live for the future. If you want to study the hair styles of Neanderthal women be my guest. Anybody with half a brain knows the one world government and language is coming. Why stop evolution, it is our destiny and it will improve the human experience. Again, we witness a distortion of scientific concepts through the use of political themes. [Warning: facts of life ahead!!] Even Xah Lee's harshest critics must acknowledge that Xah delivers a less offensive, more entertaining rant than this. At least Xah has mastered the art of the expletive. I'll bet you weep and moan for the native Americans who where slaughtered don't you? Yes they suffered a tragic death as have many poor souls throughout history and yes they also contributed to human history and experience, but their time had come and they can only blame themselfs for it. You're on a slippery slope when you claim that people deserve whatever mistreatment or misfortune comes their way through mere circumstances of birth. I suggest you step back and actually read your messages again and consider how others might interpret them. I also suggest that, unless you really wish to discuss deficiencies of Unicode with respect to Python, you don't use this list/group as a discussion forum for your ill-informed notions of progress, but instead take them to a more appropriate forum where I'm sure people will be happy to scrutinise your ideas at their leisure. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On 31 Aug, 00:28, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: I said it before and i will say it again. I DONT CARE WHAT LANGUAGE WE USE AS LONG AS IT IS A MODERN LANGUAGE FOUNDED ON IDEALS OF SIMPLICITY [Esperanto] English is by far already the de-facto lingua franca throughout the world. You don't care, but here it comes: English! And is it a language founded on ideals of simplicity? I suggest you familiarise yourself with the history of the English language. [...] You can deny the holocaust all you want but it still happened and so too shall the great unity! Sadly because of cultural and social fanatics like yourself, it will probably take another great war to usher in the new order. Now you are just being offensive. [...] So you are advocating for me to use derogatory statements in my post, no thanks i need not resort to adolescent rants to argue my points. So what was the bulk of your opening message in this thread or the kind of gutter remarks made above if not adolescent rants? And why do you continue to compare me to XL. Has XL *ever* helped a python user in this forum? I have, many times. I am *actually* a python programmer who cares about Python and my posts bring much vigor and intelligence to an otherwise boring NG -- like me or not. Whether you actually care about Python or not, I repeat my suggestion that you take rants of this nature out of this forum and to a more appropriate place. At the very time the community seeks to increase diversity, such material is not only insensitive towards those who do not share your own cultural and political background, it also demonstrates a total lack of awareness of the kind of community people are trying to build and sustain. And don't give us the livening up the newsgroup excuse. The only reason people use newsgroups like this for their political posturing is analogous to a football player bursting into a chess club and claiming superiority in his own sport over those whose pastime has been interrupted: he knows that in a more suitable venue, his inadequacy would quickly be revealed by active practitioners of the discipline. Take your material elsewhere - maybe then the historians, linguists and sociologists will give you the tuition you so richly deserve! Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Kurt Mueller wrote: Am 01.09.2009 um 09:39 schrieb Terry Reedy: But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units of measure, etc. There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English as a common language. The SI-system is nearly universally employed. Three principal exceptions are Burma (Myanmar), Liberia, and the United States. The United Kingdom has officially adopted the International System of Units but not with the intention of replacing customary measures entirely. The intention in the UK was to switch to SI over a period of 10 years, starting in 1971, so from then only SI was taught in schools. Earlier this year the EU decided that it wouldn't force the UK to abandon the few remaining uses of the Imperial system; SI is preferred, but Imperial is permitted. The roads are still Imperial, and milk delivered to the door can still use the existing pint bottles, but milk sold in shops is in SI. When I was a student, they told us, that in a couple of years there will be the SI-system only, because most countries accepted it in their laws. So we should adopt it. That was in the early 70ties. Only this year we have to deliver results of technical processes to british and US companies. They still want them in their crazy outdated units. The other thing would be the US to adopt a simplified basic English. I would not be astonished, that british people would state, that they already do :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 30, 1:08 pm, Nobody nob...@nowhere.com wrote: (snip) Because that would be the likely consequence of such a stance. Japanese websites will continue to use Shift-JIS, Japanese cellphones (or Scandanavian cellphones aimed at the Japanese market, for that matter) will continue to render websites which use Shift-JIS, and HTML 5 will be just as much a pure academic exercise as all of the other HTML standards. Yes and this keep-everyone-happy crap will go on for centuries. Unicode will then turn into another elephant sized bloatware standard that only VB and MSDN, M$ Office, and Adobe PDF can hold a candle to. Who cares, hard drives can hold terabytes of useless junk, right? This is starting to border on OCD tendencies and i for one am getting very nervous. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
I'm a lurker on this list and am here more to learn rather than teach and although better sense tells me not to feed the troll -- I'll bite. Mainly because, r, unlike XL does seem to offer help every one in a while. So, ... On 08/31/2009 03:58 AM, r wrote: On Aug 30, 2:05 pm, Paul Boddiep...@boddie.org.uk wrote: (snip) You don't care which language it is as long as it's the one you use. That's what this sounds like, layered on top of what you've already written (and what you write below). I said it before and i will say it again. I DONT CARE WHAT LANGUAGE WE USE AS LONG AS IT IS A MODERN LANGUAGE FOUNDED ON IDEALS OF SIMPLICITY I think you are confusing simplicity with uniformity. Uniformity is not always good. Sure standardizing on units of measure and airline codes is good, but expecting everyone to speak one language is akin to expecting everyone to wear one type of clothing or expecting everyone to drive just one type of automobile -- those kind of rules works well in a small sets where doing so fulfills a purpose (in the army, hospitals or taxi service, for instance). The problems associated with enforcing uniformity within larger sets are often _less_ _simple_ than finding _solutions_ to deal with _complexity_ (your misplaced philosophical rhetoric about how one-world-one-language-would-usher in-a-golden-age aside -- /that/ you should take up with any person of science and be ready to be laughed at). To put it another way, it is better to create data structures to deal with variable length names rather than mandating that everybody has names 30 chars. If you fail to understand how that applies to unicode, you sadly will have trouble understanding the existence of not only unicode, but also of TCP/IP, timezones, xml and the whole concept of Interfaces. [...snip...] Paul: civilizations rise and fall, this is beyond our control. Every great power will utter fail at some point. Some die out like a slow burning candle, others go quickly and painfully from defeating blows in war time. This is an eventuality you must face friend. This whole save the whales BS is really getting on my nerves! Stop trying to play God Paul, it is not your decision when and where the blade shall fall. When a people stop evolving and no longer have anything productive to give to evolution, evolution stamps them out. If the Indians had developed gun power and industrialized America they might be running more than merely a casino. Oh No! Was that out of line, you will probably think so. Stay in know and you shall endure... This might come as a bit of shock for you, but evolution awards those who are capable of adapting to complexity rather then those who expect things to be uniform. You, dear friend, and those who yearn for uniformity are the ones on the path to extinction. cheers, - steve -- random non tech spiel: http://lonetwin.blogspot.com/ tech randomness: http://lonehacks.blogspot.com/ what i'm stumbling into: http://lonetwin.stumbleupon.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
SI is preferred, but Imperial is permitted. IME most people in the UK under the age of 40 can speak SI without trouble. On the other hand, let's nip down to the pub for 580ml of beer just doesn't have the right ring to it ;-) On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:17:00 -0700, Matthew Barnett mrabarn...@mrabarnett.plus.com wrote: Kurt Mueller wrote: Am 01.09.2009 um 09:39 schrieb Terry Reedy: But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units of measure, etc. There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English as a common language. The SI-system is nearly universally employed. Three principal exceptions are Burma (Myanmar), Liberia, and the United States. The United Kingdom has officially adopted the International System of Units but not with the intention of replacing customary measures entirely. The intention in the UK was to switch to SI over a period of 10 years, starting in 1971, so from then only SI was taught in schools. Earlier this year the EU decided that it wouldn't force the UK to abandon the few remaining uses of the Imperial system; SI is preferred, but Imperial is permitted. The roads are still Imperial, and milk delivered to the door can still use the existing pint bottles, but milk sold in shops is in SI. When I was a student, they told us, that in a couple of years there will be the SI-system only, because most countries accepted it in their laws. So we should adopt it. That was in the early 70ties. Only this year we have to deliver results of technical processes to british and US companies. They still want them in their crazy outdated units. The other thing would be the US to adopt a simplified basic English. I would not be astonished, that british people would state, that they already do :-) -- Rami Chowdhury Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity -- Hanlon's Razor 408-597-7068 (US) / 07875-841-046 (UK) / 0189-245544 (BD) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 29, 8:20 pm, John Machin sjmac...@lexicon.net wrote: On Aug 30, 8:46 am, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language. Why do we need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of Chinese language. The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite capable of expression in ASCII (r tongzhi shi sha gua) and doesn't have those pesky it's/its problems. The A-Z char set is flawless! ... for expressing the sounds of a very limited number of languages, and English is *NOT* one of those. I'd say don't feel the troll, but too late for that I guess. I just wanted to add, in defense of the Chinese written language (in case this hasn't already been added--I'm probably not going to bother reading this entire thread) that I think it would make a fairly good candidate for use at least as a universal *written* language. Particularly simplified Chinese since, well, it's simpler. The advantages are that the grammar is relatively simple, and it can be used to illustrate concepts independently of the writer's spoken language. Sure it's tied somewhat to the Chinese language, but it can certainly be mapped more easily to any other language than phonetically-based written language. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 1, 2:39 am, Terry Reedy tjre...@udel.edu wrote: (snip) There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English as a common language. Bring on the metric system Terry, i have been waiting all my life!! Now, if we can only convince those 800 million Mandarin Chinese speakers... *ahem* Do we have a Chinese translator in the house? :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
r wrote: On Sep 1, 2:39 am, Terry Reedy tjre...@udel.edu wrote: (snip) There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English as a common language. as a common *second* language. Bring on the metric system Terry, i have been waiting all my life!! Now, if we can only convince those 800 million Mandarin Chinese speakers... *ahem* Do we have a Chinese translator in the house? They already pretty much are convinced as regards to English as a second language, which is what I meant. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 1, 1:52 pm, Hyuga hyugaricd...@gmail.com wrote: (snip) I'd say don't feel the troll, but too late for that I guess. The only trolls in this thread are you and the others who breaks into MY THREAD just for the knee-jerk reaction of troll calling! Even though you *did* offer some argument to one of the subjects of this thread, it was cancelled out by your trolling! Please come back when you have some constructive thoughts on the subjects of Python as it relates to Unicode, or Universal natural languages. Whether you want to admit it or not these subjects affect programming and Python. And here is the definition of a troll for the uneducated among us, of which it seems is surprising a very large number these days... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
The only trolls in this thread are you and the others who breaks into MY THREAD just for the knee-jerk reaction of troll calling! How does this make one's opinion any less relevant? I think the fact that you are coming across in this thread as closed-minded, bigoted, and uninformed gives everyone plenty of right to accuse you of trolling. Being aggressive about it doesn't help. Yes, Unicode is a hack, but it's a hack necessitated by the prevalence (and naivete) of ASCII. If you're advocating something as absurd as standardizing on a universal, simple language, how about an almost equally ridiculous proposal: why don't we break backwards-compatibility with ASCII? -- Rami Chowdhury Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity -- Hanlon's Razor 408-597-7068 (US) / 07875-841-046 (UK) / 0189-245544 (BD) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:35:46 -0700, Rami Chowdhury wrote: SI is preferred, but Imperial is permitted. IME most people in the UK under the age of 40 can speak SI without trouble. On the other hand, let's nip down to the pub for 580ml of beer just doesn't have the right ring to it ;-) Oh those wacky Brits and their obsession with precision -- why do they have to specify the volume of beer? What's wrong with any of these? Let's nip down to the pub for a beer. Let's nip down to the pub for a couple of drinks. Let's nip down to the pub -- good for drinkers who prefer a brandy. Let's go get hammered! -- what they're really thinking. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sep 1, 6:06 pm, Rami Chowdhury rami.chowdh...@gmail.com wrote: (snip: trolling tirade) I don't think when i started this thread i had any intentions what-so- ever of pleasing asinine-anthropologist, sociology-sickos, or neo-nazi- linguist. No, actually i am quite sure of that is the case! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:29:54 -0700, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: [snip: variety of almost-alliterative epithets] Well, if you admit you set out to offend people, then you're trolling. -- Rami Chowdhury Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity -- Hanlon's Razor 408-597-7068 (US) / 07875-841-046 (UK) / 0189-245544 (BD) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sunday 30 August 2009 22:46:49 Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: Rather elitist viewpoint... Why don't we just drop nukes on some 60% of populated landmasses that don't have a western culture and avoid the whole problem? Now yer talking, boyo! It will surely help with the basic problem which is the heavy infestation of people on the planet! :-) - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Hendrik van Rooyen wrote: On Sunday 30 August 2009 22:46:49 Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: Rather elitist viewpoint... Why don't we just drop nukes on some 60% of populated landmasses that don't have a western culture and avoid the whole problem? Now yer talking, boyo! It will surely help with the basic problem which is the heavy infestation of people on the planet! :-) bait On two conditions: 1) We drop some test bombs on Slough to satisfy Betjeman. 2) We strap both Xah and r to aforementioned bombs. /bait switch Also, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Esperanto yet. Sounds like something r and Xah would *love*. Slightly off-topic - does anyone have a good recipe for getting thunderbird to kill whole threads for good? Either based on a rule or just some extension I can use? The Xah/r threads are like car crashes, I can't help but watch but my time could be better spent and I don't want to unsub the whole list. /switch Cheers, n -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
No need to feed the troll by actually trying to engage in the discussion, but just FYI: Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian languages. Devanagari is what's used for Hindi and a handful of other languages, yes, but most Indian languages (Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, and Tamil just to name a few) use different scripts. On Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:07:17 -0700, Neil Hodgson nyamatongwe+thun...@gmail.com wrote: Benjamin Peterson: Like Sanskrit or Snowman language? Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian languages. Not sure if you are referring to the ☃ snowman character or Arctic region languages like Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing like ᐲᐦᒑᔨᕽ which were added to Unicode 8 years after the initial version. I'd guess that was added from political rather than marketing motives. ☃ was required since it was present in Japanese character sets. Neil -- Rami Chowdhury Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity -- Hanlon's Razor 408-597-7068 (US) / 07875-841-046 (UK) / 0189-245544 (BD) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On 8/31/2009 10:41 AM Dennis Lee Bieber said... On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:36:46 +0100, Nigel Rantor wig...@wiggly.org snip Also, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Esperanto yet. Sounds like something r and Xah would *love*. Hmmm, thought I had mentioned Esperanto (and Klingon) Just curious -- has anyone mentioned autocoding? :) Emile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Chris Jones: Is the implication that the principal usefulness of such languages as Hindi and other Indian languages is us selling things to them..? Unicode was developed by a group of US corporations: Xerox, Apple, Sun, Microsoft, ... The main motivation was to avoid dealing with multiple character set encodings since this was difficult, time consuming and expensive. I am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of voice rather offensive, considering that you are referring to a culture that's about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and certainly deserves our respect. Eh? Was Unicode developed in India? China? What precisely is direspectful here? Is there a significant population that regards Unicode as their 'holy patrimony' that will suffer distress due to my post? Maybe you didn't notice, but our plants shut down many years ago.. They are selling _us_ their wares. Maybe your plants shut down but some of the plants I have worked at (such as the steelworks at Port Kembla) are still successfully exporting to Asia. Neil -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:22:00 -0400, Chris Jones wrote: On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:07:17PM EDT, Neil Hodgson wrote: Benjamin Peterson: Like Sanskrit or Snowman language? Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian languages. Is the implication that the principal usefulness of such languages as Hindi and other Indian languages is us selling things to them..? I am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of voice rather offensive, I think Neil's point is that Unicode has succeeded in the wider world, outside of academic circles, because of the commercial need to communicate between cultures using different character sets. I suppose he could have worded it better, but fundamentally he's right: without the commercial need to trade across the world (information as well as physical goods) I doubt Unicode would be anything more than an interesting curiosity of use only to a few academics and linguists. considering that you are referring to a culture that's about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and certainly deserves our respect. Older, certainly, but richer? There's a reason that Indians come to the West rather than Westerners going to India. As Terry Pratchet has written, age is not linked to wisdom -- just because somebody is old, doesn't mean they're wise, perhaps they've just been stupid for a very long time. The same goes for cultures: old doesn't mean better. Indian culture has been responsible for many wonderful things over the millennia, but the cast system is not one of them, and any culture which glorified sati (suttee) as an act of piety is not one we should look up to. Sati was probably rare even at the height of it's popularity, and vanishingly rare now, and arguably could even be defended as the right of an adult to end their own life when they see fit, but dowry-burning is outright murder and is sadly very common across the Indian sub-continent: some estimates suggest that in the mid-1990s there were nearly 6000 such murders a year in India. If we are to be truly non-racist, we must recognise that the West does not have a monopoly on wickedness, ignorance, spite and sheer awfulness. In any case, I'm not sure we should be talking about Indian culture in the singular -- India is about as large as Western Europe, significantly more varied, and the culture has changed over time. The India which treated the Karma Sutra as a holy book is hardly the same India where people literally rioted in the street because Richard Gere gave the actress Shilpa Shetty a couple of rather theatrical and silly kisses on the cheek. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: Some may say well how can we possibly force countries/people to speak/ code in a uniform manner? Well that's simple, you just stop supporting their cryptic languages by dumping Unicode and returning to the beautiful ASCII and adopting English as the universal world language. v Why English? Well because it is so widely spoken. But whatever we choose just choose one language and stick with it, perfect it, and maintain it. Y’know, it is naïve to think that the “beautiful” ASCII is sufficient for English… Besides, there is the APL... (though, you are right, we should dump those crappy old languages and use Python exclusively) -- --- | Radovan Garabík http://kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk/~garabik/ | | __..--^^^--..__garabik @ kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk | --- Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus. Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
* r (Sat, 29 Aug 2009 18:30:34 -0700 (PDT)) We don't support a Python group in Chinese or French, so why this? We do - you don't (or to be more realistic, you simply didn't know it). Makes no sense to me really. Like probably 99.9% of all things you hear, read, see and encounter during the day. By the way: the dumbness of your Unicode rant would have even ashamed the great XL himself. Thorsten -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
* Neil Hodgson (Sun, 30 Aug 2009 06:17:14 GMT) Chris Jones: I am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of voice rather offensive, considering that you are referring to a culture that's about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and certainly deserves our respect. Eh? Was Unicode developed in India? China? Chris was obviously talking about Sanskrit... Thorsten -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
* Chris Jones (Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:22:00 -0400) On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:07:17PM EDT, Neil Hodgson wrote: Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian languages. Is the implication that the principal usefulness of such languages as Hindi and other Indian languages is us selling things to them..? I am not from these climes but all the same, I do find you tone of voice rather offensive, considering that you are referring to a culture that's about 3000 years older and 3000 richer than ours and certainly deserves our respect. Neil was obviously talking about Devanagari. Please also mind the principal difference between Neil's also useful and your principal useful(ness). Thorsten -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
r rt8396 at gmail.com writes: Why should the larger world keep supporting such antiquated languages and character sets through Unicode? What purpose does this serve? Are we merely trying to make everyone happy? A sort of Utopian free-language-love-fest-kinda- thing? Can you go and troll somewhere else? Thanks. Antoine. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
* John Machin (Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:20:47 -0700 (PDT)) On Aug 30, 8:46 am, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language. Why do we need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of Chinese language. The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite capable of expression in ASCII (r tongzhi shi sha gua) and doesn't have those pesky it's/its problems. You could also put it differently: the Chinese language (like any other language) doesn't even have characters. It's really funny to see how someone who rants about Unicode doesn't event knows the most basic facts. Thorsten -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sunday 30 August 2009 02:20:47 John Machin wrote: On Aug 30, 8:46 am, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language. Why do we need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of Chinese language. The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite capable of expression in ASCII (r tongzhi shi sha gua) and doesn't have those pesky it's/its problems. The A-Z char set is flawless! ... for expressing the sounds of a very limited number of languages, and English is *NOT* one of those. I suspect that the alphabet is not ideal for representing the sounds of _any_ language, and I would look for my proof in the plethora of things that we use when writing, other than the bare A-Z. - Punctuation, diacritics... But what really started me thinking, after reading this post of John's, read with Dennis'. - on the dissimilarity of the spoken and written Chinese - was the basic dichotomy of the two systems - a symbol for a sound vs a symbol for a word or an idea. I know that when I read, I do not actually read the characters, I recognize words, and only fall back to messing with characters when I hit something unfamiliar. So It would seem to me that r's utopia could sooner be realized if the former system were abandoned in favour of the latter. - and Horrors! The language of choice would not be English! Not that I agree that it would be a Utopia, whatever the language - more like a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal experience that there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity would be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and progress would slow or stop. - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 29, 11:05 pm, Anny Mous b1540...@tyldd.com wrote: (snip) How do we distinguish resume from résumé without accents? This is another quirk of some languages that befuddles me. What is with the ongoing language pronunciation tutorial some languages have turned into -- French is a good example (*puke*). Do you *really* need those squiggly lines and cues above letters so you won't forget how to pronounce a word. Pure ridiculousness! Even when we succeed in banning all languages that can't be written using A-Z, what do we do about the vast number of legacy documents? How do we write about obsolete English letters like Ð and Þ without Unicode? Who gives a fig about obsolete languages, thank god they are dead and let's move on!! Some may say well how can we possibly force countries/people to speak/ code in a uniform manner? Well that's simple, you just stop supporting their cryptic languages by dumping Unicode and returning to the beautiful ASCII and adopting English as the universal world language. Why English? Well because it is so widely spoken. World population: 6.7 billion Number of native Mandarin speakers: 873 million Number of native Hindi speakers: 370 million Number of native Spanish speakers: 350 million Number of native English speakers: 340 million Total number of Mandarin speakers: 1051 million Total number of English speakers: 510 million http://www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm I was actually referring to countries where the majority of people *actually* know what a computer is and how to use it... If there culture has not caught up with western technology yet they are doomed to the fate of native American Indians. Whichever way you look at it, we should all convert to Mandarin, not English. Looks like we still need Unicode. see my last comment (snip entertaining assumptions) Yes, because language differences have utterly destroyed us so many times in the past! Have you thought about the difference between China, with one culture and one spoken language for thousands of years, and Europe, with dozens of competing cultures, competing governments, and alternate languages for just as long? If multiple languages are so harmful, why was it the British, French, Japanese, Russians, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians and Americans who were occupying China during the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, instead of the other way around? Strength comes from diversity, not monoculture. No strength comes from superior firepower. The Chinese culture stop evolving thousands of years ago. Who invented gun powder? Yes the Chinese and all they could do with it was create fireworks. Europeans took gun powered and started a revolution that changes the world forever -- for better and for worse, but that is how advancements work. It wasn't until western influence came along and finally nudged china into the 21st century. Europeans seek out technology and aren't dragged down by an antiquated culture which is good for innovation. If China with it's huge population thought like a European, they would rule the earth for 10,000 years. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 30, 3:33 am, Thorsten Kampe thors...@thorstenkampe.de wrote: [snip ridiculous trolling] Thorsten Hmm, I wonder who's sock puppet you are Thorsten? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 30, 7:11 am, Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za wrote: (snip) Not that I agree that it would be a Utopia, whatever the language - more like a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal experience that there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity would be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and progress would slow or stop. - Hendrik What makes you think that diversity is lost with a single language? I say more pollination will occur and the seed will be more potent since all parties will contribute to the same pool. Sure there will be idioms of different regions but that is to be expected. But at least then i could make international crank calls without the language barrier ;-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On 30 Aug, 14:49, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: It can be made better and if that means add/removing letters or redefining what a letter represents i am fine with that. I know first hand the hypocrisy of the English language. I am thinking more on the lines of English redux! Elsewhere in this thread you've written... This is another quirk of some languages that befuddles me. What is with the ongoing language pronunciation tutorial some languages have turned into -- French is a good example (*puke*). Do you *really* need those squiggly lines and cues above letters so you won't forget how to pronounce a word. Pure ridiculousness! And, in fact, there have been schemes to simplify written English such as Initial Teaching Alphabet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet I imagine that this is the first time you've heard of it, though. [...] We already live in a Orwellian language nightmare. Have you seen much change to the English language in your lifetime? i haven't. Then you aren't paying attention. Especially in places where English isn't the first language, there is a lot of modification of English that is then considered an acceptable version of the language - this is one way in which languages change. Elsewhere, you wrote this... What makes you think that diversity is lost with a single language? I say more pollination will occur and the seed will be more potent since all parties will contribute to the same pool. Parties are contributing to the same language already. It's just not the only language that they contribute to. From what you've written, I get the impression that you don't really know any other languages, don't have much experience with non-native users of your own language, are oblivious to how languages change, and are oblivious to the existence of various attempts to improve the English language in the past in ways similar to those you appear to advocate, albeit incoherently: do you want to know how to pronounce a word from its spelling or not? Add to that a complete lack of appreciation for the relationship between language and culture, along with a perverted application of evolutionary models to such things, and you come across as a lazy cultural supremacist who regards everyone else's language as superfluous apart from his own. If you're just having problems with UnicodeDecodeError, at least have the honesty to say so instead of parading something not too short of bigotry in a public forum. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sunday 30 August 2009 15:37:19 r wrote: What makes you think that diversity is lost with a single language? I am quite sure of this - it goes deeper than mere regional differences - your first language forms the way you think - and if we all get taught the same language, then on a very fundamental level we will all think in a similar way, and that loss will outweigh the normal regional or cultural differences on which you would have to rely for your diversity. Philip Larkin has explained the effect better than I can: They f*ck you up, your mom and dad, They do not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, And add some extra, just for you. I say more pollination will occur and the seed will be more potent since all parties will contribute to the same pool. I think this effect, while it might be real, would be swamped by the loss of the real diversity. Sure there will be idioms of different regions but that is to be expected. But at least then i could make international crank calls without the language barrier ;-) You can make crank calls _now_ without a language barrier - heavy breathing is a universally understood idiom. :-) - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sat, 29 Aug 2009 22:14:55 -0700, John Nagle wrote: (I wish the HTML standards people would do the same. HTML 5 should have been ASCII only (with the escapes if desired) or Unicode. No Latin-1, no upper code pages, no JIS, etc.) IOW, you want the HTML standards to continue to be meaningless documents, and HTML to continue to mean what browsers support. Because that would be the likely consequence of such a stance. Japanese websites will continue to use Shift-JIS, Japanese cellphones (or Scandanavian cellphones aimed at the Japanese market, for that matter) will continue to render websites which use Shift-JIS, and HTML 5 will be just as much a pure academic exercise as all of the other HTML standards. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
30-08-2009 o 14:11:15 Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za wrote: a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal experience that there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity would be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and progress would slow or stop. That's the point! Even in the case of programming languages we say about 'culture' and 'way of thinking' connected with each of them, though after all they are only formal constructs. In case of natural languages it's incomparably richer and more complex. Each natural language has richness of culture and ages of history -- behind that language and recorded in it in many ways. Most probably such an unification would mean terrible impoverishment of our (humans') culture and, as a result, terrible squandering of our intelectual, emotional, cognitive etc. potential -- especially if such unification were a result of intentional policy (and not of a slow and 'patient' process of synthesis). *j -- Jan Kaliszewski (zuo) z...@chopin.edu.pl -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 29, 7:22 pm, Neil Hodgson nyamatongwe+thun...@gmail.com wrote: Wow, I like this world you live in: all that altruism! Well if i don't who will? *shrugs* Unicode was developed by corporations from the US left coast in order to sell their products in foreign markets at minimal cost. So why the heck are we supporting such capitalistic implementations as Unicode. Sure we must support a winders installer but Unicode, dump it! We don't support a Python group in Chinese or French, so why this? Makes no sense to me really. Let M$ deal with it. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 30, 4:47 pm, Dennis Lee Bieber wlfr...@ix.netcom.com wrote: On Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:05:24 +1000, Anny Mous b1540...@tyldd.com declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general: Have you thought about the difference between China, with one culture and one spoken language for thousands of years, and Europe, with dozens of China has one WRITTEN language -- It has multiple SPOKEN languages ... hence Chinese movies have subtitles in Chinese. And it can't really be called one written language. For a start there are the Traditional characters and the Simplified characters. Then there are regional variations and add-ons e.g. the Hong Kong Special Character Set (now added into Unicode): not academic-only stuff, includes surnames, the Hang in Hang Seng Index and Hang Seng Bank, and the 5th character of the Chinese name of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited on the banknotes it issues. (the main two being mandarin and cantonese -- with enough differences between them that they might as well be spanish vs italian) Mandarin and Cantonese are groups of languages/dialects. Rough figures (millions): Mandarin 850, Wu 90, Min and Cantonese about 70 each. The intelligibility comparison is more like Romanian vs Portuguese, or Icelandic vs Dutch. I've heard that the PLA used Shanghainese (Wu group) as code talkers just like the USMC used Navajos. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 30, 7:11 am, Hendrik van Rooyen hend...@microcorp.co.za wrote: (snip) I suspect that the alphabet is not ideal for representing the sounds of _any_ language, and I would look for my proof in the plethora of things that we use when writing, other than the bare A-Z. - Punctuation, diacritics... It can be made better and if that means add/removing letters or redefining what a letter represents i am fine with that. I know first hand the hypocrisy of the English language. I am thinking more on the lines of English redux! Not that I agree that it would be a Utopia, whatever the language - more like a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal experience that there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity would be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and progress would slow or stop. We already live in a Orwellian language nightmare. Have you seen much change to the English language in your lifetime? i haven't. A language must constantly evolve and trim the excess cruft that pollutes it. And English has a mountain of cruft! After all our years on this planet i think it's high time to perfect a simplified language for world-wide usage. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 30, 10:09 am, Paul Boddie p...@boddie.org.uk wrote: On 30 Aug, 14:49, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: Then you aren't paying attention. ...(snip: defamation of character) Hold the phone Paul you are calling me a retarded bigot and i don't much appreciate that. I think you are completely misinterpreting my post. i and i ask you read it again especially this part... [quote] BUT STOP!, before i go any further i want to respond to what i know will be condemnation from the sociology nuts out there. Yes multiculturalism is great, yes art is great, but if you can't see how the ability to communicate is severely damperd by multi-languages then you only *feel* with your heart but you apparently have no ability to reason with your mind intelligently. [/quote] I don't really care what language we adopt as long as we choose *only* one and then seek to perfect it to perfection. And also that this *one* language use simplicity as it's model. English sucks, but compared to traditional Chinese and Egyptian Hieroglyphs it's a god send. I think a good language would combine the best of the popular world languages into one super language for all. The same thing Python did for programming. But of course programming is not as evolved as natural language so we will need multiple programming languages for quite some time... And just as the internet enabled worldwide instant communication, the unification of all languages will cause a Renaissance of sorts for coloaboration which in turn will beget innovation of enormous proportions. The ability to communicate unhampered is in everyones best interest. --- History Lesson and the laws of Nature --- Look history is great but i am more concerned with the future. Learn the lessons of the past, move on, and live for the future. If you want to study the hair styles of Neanderthal women be my guest. Anybody with half a brain knows the one world government and language is coming. Why stop evolution, it is our destiny and it will improve the human experience. [Warning: facts of life ahead!!] I'll bet you weep and moan for the native Americans who where slaughtered don't you? Yes they suffered a tragic death as have many poor souls throughout history and yes they also contributed to human history and experience, but their time had come and they can only blame themselfs for it. They stopped evolving, and when you stop evolving you get left behind. We can't win wars with bows and arrows in the 21st century, we can't fly to the moon on horse back, And you damn sure can smoke a peace pipe and make all the bad things disappear. Nature can be cruel and unjust at times, but progress is absolute and that is all mother nature (and myself to some extent) really cares about. Without the survival of the fittest nothing you see, feel, touch, or experience would be. The universe would collapse upon itself and cease to exist. The system works because it is perfect. Don't knock that which you do not understand, or, you refuse to understand.. We are but pawns in an ever evolving higher order entity. And when this entity no longer has a use for us, we will be history... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
Would someone please point me to one example where this sociology or anthropology crap has ever improved our day to day lives or moved use into the future with great innovation? A life spend studying this mumbo-jumbo is a complete waste of time when many other far more important and *real* problems need solving! To me this is nothing more than educated people going antiquing on a Saturday afternoon! All they are going to find is more useless, overpriced junk that clogs up the closets of society! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
So why the heck are we supporting such capitalistic implementations as Unicode. Sure we must support a winders installer but Unicode, dump it! We don't support a Python group in Chinese or French, so why this? Makes no sense to me really. Let M$ deal with it. Who, exactly, do you think we are? You're off talking about The Python Community again, aren't you. I thought we talked about that. We are a group of diverse people from diverse backgrounds-- national and linguistic-- and quite a few who either run our own business or are connected to businesses. A very huge chunk of folk around here quite like capitalistic implementations. Python's very business and closed-source friendly, remember? This crusade change the world crap is so strikingly stupid of a troll approach for this group, I'm startled that it's worked. But it has, so kudos to you! Can't you go try to get someone fired up who has some philosophical basis in the group's existence? Python's not the FSF*. It's not software-for-freedom to change the world. It's software to get things done, and keep things done down the road. ... sigh. I fed the troll. --S P.S. *And I mean no insult by this towards the FSFL. It's a political/philosophical for-the-good-of-humanity organization, is all. Good for them. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 07:12:26PM EDT, Stephen Hansen wrote: Unicode (*puke*) seems nothing more than a brain fart of morons. And sadly it was created by CS majors who i assumed used logic and deductive reasoning but i must be wrong. Why should the larger world keep supporting such antiquated languages and character sets through Unicode? What purpose does this serve? Are we merely trying to make everyone happy? A sort of Utopian free-language-love-fest-kinda- thing? One really shouldn't consider Xah Lee a role model and seek to imitate (poorly) his rants. :-) CJ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 30, 8:46 am, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language. Why do we need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of Chinese language. The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite capable of expression in ASCII (r tongzhi shi sha gua) and doesn't have those pesky it's/its problems. The A-Z char set is flawless! ... for expressing the sounds of a very limited number of languages, and English is *NOT* one of those. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
r: Unicode (*puke*) seems nothing more than a brain fart of morons. And sadly it was created by CS majors who i assumed used logic and deductive reasoning but i must be wrong. Why should the larger world keep supporting such antiquated languages and character sets through Unicode? What purpose does this serve? Are we merely trying to make everyone happy? A sort of Utopian free-language-love-fest-kinda- thing? Wow, I like this world you live in: all that altruism! Unicode was developed by corporations from the US left coast in order to sell their products in foreign markets at minimal cost. Neil -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: An assessment of the Unicode standard
On Aug 29, 7:20 pm, John Machin sjmac...@lexicon.net wrote: On Aug 30, 8:46 am, r rt8...@gmail.com wrote: The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite capable of expression in ASCII (r tongzhi shi sha gua) and doesn't have those pesky it's/its problems. Oh yes of course it is the most widely spoken amongst Chinese people since one in every five people on this earth are Chinese. What i meant to say was that English language is more widespread outside of normal English speaking countries -- of course as a result of colonialism, and arguably, imperialism. ;) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
