From: William_J_G Overington (wjgo_10009@btinternet.com)
Date: Mon Jan 18 2010 - 11:34:32 CST
On Monday 18 January 2010, Doug Ewell <doug@ewellic.org> wrote:
> 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.).
Well, there would be a set of sentences encoded, perhaps about as many as there are emoji being encoded at present.
In relation to the two example sentences that you quote, into how many languages can you express those meanings yourself? Into how many languages could you translate my poem that is in the other current thread about localizable sentences yourself?
> 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.
Well, there would not be one.
Maybe I am looking at it from another direction, but I look at it in a similar manner to the situation that there are many images in the world, yet clip art is available and is useful even though it does not cover every possible picture in the world and a collection of emoji are encoded and people enjoy using them even though the collection of emoji encoded does not cover every possible picture in the world.
For example, there is not an emoji for "AN OKAPI" nor for a "A DAVIDIA INVOLUCRATA" nor for lots of things.
The emoji set being encoded into Unicode consists of a number, not too small a number yet also not an enormous number, of items.
So too would the set of localizable sentences consist of a number, not too small a number yet also not an enormous number, of items. maybe a few more than the emoji, maybe a few less, yet of the same sort of order of magnitude.
Notwithstanding that in relation to all of the images in the world and in the imagination of everybody the number of emoji is a vanishingly small percentage of them, nevertheless the set is available on some mobile telephones and at least some of them are used and people communicate using them.
The same reasoning applies to the set of localizable sentences that are defined. In relation to all of the possible sentences that could exist the number of localizable sentences is a vanishingly small percentage of them, yet nevertheless the set could be made available on some mobile telephones and automatically localized into a chosen language on a mobile telephone that receives them. Hopefully it could be arranged that in a local setting that the codes could be thrown from one iPhone to another iPhone and the localized message displayed.
I have been using Google Streetview to help in this research. Please see the following posts in the same thread.
http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?p=12127#p12127
http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?p=12158#p12158
The link to the whole thread is as follows.
http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2862
This is about seeking and receiving directions to a pharmacy.
It would be a matter of research to decide which sentences would be of the most use for a number of chosen purposes.
William Overington
18 January 2010
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