5 ms·

I wonder how computers would process text if societies with more complex alphabets had been at the foundation of the industry instead of English-speaking societ

by bbq 13y ago

I wonder how computers would process text if societies with more complex alphabets had been at the foundation of the industry instead of English-speaking societies. What if Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple were all Japanese companies and grew in a global market where English were not dominant? A big if, sure. Certainly, there must be glimpses at this in history of computing.

hrktb 13y ago
You can look at Sharp or Toshiba building word processors, which were dedicated electronic appliances, but slowly moving to generic computers as they became cheap and good enough to manage complex input methods and non english character display (i.e. enough pixels per screen to have recognizable characters). It's funny to think that the concept of a fully functional typewriter would be foreign to Japan until dedicated computers could be built.
- bbq 13y ago
  Huh, that's interesting. Perhaps computing simply took the path of least resistance to express itself in society (for better or worse).
stevewillows 13y ago
The video mentioned that Japan developed five different encodings that couldn't talk to each other. So in a sense, regardless of who started it, we would have ended up at something similar to UTF-8.
- contingencies 13y ago
  Mainland China and Taiwan did something similar. I actually went to one of the newly-post-Unicode meets of Academica Sinica in Taipei where hardcore ancient Chinese academics and computational linguists were discussing unsolved conversion issues for some of those creatures.
  - stevewillows 13y ago
    How often does UTF-8 update to account for these issues?
    - plorkyeran 13y ago
      UTF-8 has only been updated once (to remove 5 and 6 byte sequences, to limit it to the same range of values that UTF-16 can express). New versions of Unicode are standardized every year or two.
    - contingencies 13y ago
      I think basically people who need to communicate beyond a certain age tend to avoid Unicode and just use images, and CJK Unicode is essentially fixed, even if still changing slowly now. More info here: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr38/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr38/ My overall impression was that super ancient characters (of which there are tens of thousands more, probably with many academic arguments as to their individual distinctions or similarities) have been left out of Unicode proper and are under some documentation/standardization effort by a separate group as a 'special use region' mapping within Unicode for their own use by agreement. I can't find their site, though I could swear I had it a few years back. Initially, "Han unification" was an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the so-called CJK languages (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) into a single set of unified characters and was completed for the purposes of Unicode in 1991 (Unicode 1.0). Unfortunately, not only did they try to get modern scholars to agree on a normalized set of characters, but they also wanted them to agree of semantic equivalence (and a subset of pronunciations!)... in all cases... across all time: obviously not a good way to please hardcore academics. (It should be noted that Vietnamese also used Chinese, that in ancient history (even ~3000+ years ago) numerous non-Chinese ideographic/logographic/alphabetic scripts existed in the south-western Chinese borderland, and that in modern Chinese, certain surviving characters today seen as 'Cantonese' (from southern Chinese coast to east of Vietnam) are a surviving relic of this arguably greater and prodominantly Southern Chinese culture of ideogrammatic innovation). Some of the scripts still survive archaeologically, others survive in literary reference, and some (though primarily alphabetic, save for the Naxi Dongba script, an understanding of which is critically endangered to lost now despite government efforts at preservation) are still alive today... often with government reforms or some 19th century debris of Jesuit or other religious meddling.
jrochkind1 13y ago
I think I've seen some people argue that it's not a coincidence that the development of computers happened in a culture with a small phonetic(-ish) alphabet, that this facilitated the development of computers. To me, that sounds both rather too teleological, and plausible.

by bbq 13y ago

hrktb 13y ago

You can look at Sharp or Toshiba building word processors, which were dedicated electronic appliances, but slowly moving to generic computers as they became cheap and good enough to manage complex input methods and non english character display (i.e. enough pixels per screen to have recognizable characters). It's funny to think that the concept of a fully functional typewriter would be foreign to Japan until dedicated computers could be built.

bbq 13y ago
Huh, that's interesting. Perhaps computing simply took the path of least resistance to express itself in society (for better or worse).

stevewillows 13y ago

The video mentioned that Japan developed five different encodings that couldn't talk to each other. So in a sense, regardless of who started it, we would have ended up at something similar to UTF-8.

contingencies 13y ago
Mainland China and Taiwan did something similar. I actually went to one of the newly-post-Unicode meets of Academica Sinica in Taipei where hardcore ancient Chinese academics and computational linguists were discussing unsolved conversion issues for some of those creatures.
- stevewillows 13y ago
  How often does UTF-8 update to account for these issues?
  - plorkyeran 13y ago
    UTF-8 has only been updated once (to remove 5 and 6 byte sequences, to limit it to the same range of values that UTF-16 can express). New versions of Unicode are standardized every year or two.
  - contingencies 13y ago
    I think basically people who need to communicate beyond a certain age tend to avoid Unicode and just use images, and CJK Unicode is essentially fixed, even if still changing slowly now. More info here: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr38/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr38/ My overall impression was that super ancient characters (of which there are tens of thousands more, probably with many academic arguments as to their individual distinctions or similarities) have been left out of Unicode proper and are under some documentation/standardization effort by a separate group as a 'special use region' mapping within Unicode for their own use by agreement. I can't find their site, though I could swear I had it a few years back. Initially, "Han unification" was an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the so-called CJK languages (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) into a single set of unified characters and was completed for the purposes of Unicode in 1991 (Unicode 1.0). Unfortunately, not only did they try to get modern scholars to agree on a normalized set of characters, but they also wanted them to agree of semantic equivalence (and a subset of pronunciations!)... in all cases... across all time: obviously not a good way to please hardcore academics. (It should be noted that Vietnamese also used Chinese, that in ancient history (even ~3000+ years ago) numerous non-Chinese ideographic/logographic/alphabetic scripts existed in the south-western Chinese borderland, and that in modern Chinese, certain surviving characters today seen as 'Cantonese' (from southern Chinese coast to east of Vietnam) are a surviving relic of this arguably greater and prodominantly Southern Chinese culture of ideogrammatic innovation). Some of the scripts still survive archaeologically, others survive in literary reference, and some (though primarily alphabetic, save for the Naxi Dongba script, an understanding of which is critically endangered to lost now despite government efforts at preservation) are still alive today... often with government reforms or some 19th century debris of Jesuit or other religious meddling.

jrochkind1 13y ago

I think I've seen some people argue that it's not a coincidence that the development of computers happened in a culture with a small phonetic(-ish) alphabet, that this facilitated the development of computers. To me, that sounds both rather too teleological, and plausible.