Re: Localizable sentences are in a PUA for development purposes (from Re: off-topic discussions)

From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Mon Jan 18 2010 - 08:14:51 CST

  • Next message: Jon Hanna: "Re: Localizable sentences are in a PUA for development purposes (from Re: off-topic discussions)"

    "William_J_G Overington" <wjgo underscore 10009 at btinternet dot com>
    wrote:

    > For the avoidance of doubt, the localizable sentences are not
    > non-characters in the Unicode sense, they are suitable for sending
    > messages within the rules of using private use characters.

    They are not "noncharacters" (no hyphen) in the sense that U+FDD0 and
    U+10FFFF are noncharacters. I used the term "non-character purposes" to
    express my opinion that entire sentences are not the sort of data
    normally represented by a single character.

    > Hopefully one day some localizable sentences, not necessarily those
    > used by me in the experiments, will be encoded into regular Unicode.

    Neither I nor anyone else will be able to persuade you of the inadequacy
    of this approach to internationalization of text. But I note that of
    the sentences in this message and the preceding messages, the only
    sentences which would be at all amenable to this sort of treatment are
    the childishly simple ones ("It is winter," "The colour is white,"
    etc.). What character, for example, would be assigned to this sentence:

    > It seems to me that if one or more manufacturers of mobile telephones
    > produced a list of localizable sentences, language-independent glyphs
    > for them and Unicode Private Use Area codepoints for them,
    > incorporated them into mobile telephones or maybe not even into
    > hardware but into software applications to run on mobile telephones,
    > then there is a high probability that the Unicode Consortium would
    > quickly encode the localizable sentences into regular Unicode.

    --
    Doug Ewell  |  Thornton, Colorado, USA  |  http://www.ewellic.org
    RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14  |  ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s ­
    


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