Re: About cultural/languages communities flags

With ISO3166, there's almost always an objective answer to "what is the
flag?". UA may be breaking up, but many of those opposed to the Kyiv
government would prefer not to be in UA anyway. Sometimes there's a dispute
as to which group is running a country, like in SY at the moment, but I'm
guessing few would yet claim it's time to change the flag there. EH may be
a problem.

For languages, there's often no objective answer, unless you ask "which
country has the most speakers?", and then you'd have to ask about first
language vs second/third/etc. What flag for English? India, UK, US, or
something else? What about sub-national language? I have been told there
are more Tokelauans (and therefore to a first approximation speakers of
Tokelauan) in Wellington NZ, than there are in Tokelau itself. Which flag
for them?

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 4:22 PM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> Another solution isalso to not extend the scope of use of RIS characters
> (leave them as they are for ISO3166-1 based codes only), but defne a
> separate set with "Language Indicator Symbols" (LIS) working the same way,
> but based on ISO 639-2 or -3 (3-letter codes, accepting also the language
> family codes also encoded on 3 letters, as well as alll -3 macrolanguages
> such as "zho" for Chinese or "que" for Quechua).
>
> Exactly the same principle as RIS, and as easy to produce with a generic
> font with very few actual glyphs (on the Ligatures OpenType table may look
> long, but it can be generated automatically by a basic script, to integrate
> it in the font build project). No need of complex ligature support, all can
> work based with a single lookup table of pairs (of glyph ids), simply
> because there's no need for reordering glyphs. And the default glyph id's
> for indidual LIS charactes would be mapped to the default building blocks
> shoiowing the "speech bubble frame" (so a baisc renderer not processing the
> fonct SUBST tables for ligatures would still produce the basic glyphs and
> produce a consistant result (even if no decorated bubble would show the
> colorful and decorated content matching a user-expected "flag" that would
> be produced in font whose design is based on country/region flags.
>
> No requirement by Unicode about how the decorated glyphs will look or
> about their use or color. Just like fonts with various styles for emojis,
> the font to use could be a user preference for the reader. No requirement
> as well to use an OpenType renderer, applications can use icons as well in
> any convenient graphic format (GIF, PNG, SVG...) as long as they match in
> term of dimension within the standard line height (not more than about 1.25
> em in height incluiding top and bottom bearings). No requirement as well
> about their width. basic font styles (bold, italic) could be rendered as
> well by the default glyphs, either on their inner letters, or on the type
> of bubble frame, including for colorful bubbles whose generic "rounded
> rectangle" frame can also be "italicized" and bolden even when tit has a
> colorful complex content.
>
> Nowhere, that will mean that Unicode defines what is a valid language or
> not. All well-formed triplets are valid, and users are free to use 3-code
> sequences of LIS to do what they want as long as this respects the known
> ISO639 standard (otr its history, including retired codes). So it will be
> wellformed to use LIS codes to "say": yes or YES, with LIS[Y]+LIS[E]+LIS[S]
> (but if there's a ISO 639 language matching the code "yes",it is also valid
> to replace it with a bubble showing inside a culturally associated
> "flag-like" decoration. French uses could also use LIS[O]+LIS[U]+LIS[I] to
> "say": "oui" or "OUI", even if there's another ISO639 language matchin the
> code "oui" (there's inherently no violation of the per-character identity
> of LIS characters as Unicode does not encode ligatures or require them to
> be used for rendering.
>
>
> 2015-02-13 5:15 GMT+01:00 Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>:
>
>> RIS could represent languages as well, using BCP47 principle, except that
>> they start by an ISO
>> 3166 coide (as there's no territory, you'd normally use a 3166 code for
>> undetermined region, but there's no 3166 code that starts by an hyphen.
>> So to use a BCP47 language tag you could use the hyphen reencoded to RIS
>> as the first character.
>> The problem is that langauge codes in BCP47 have variable sizes. Even if
>> you limit just to the ISO639 compatible repertoire (3 letter codes) you'd
>> need to use 4 RIS codes
>> And the language flags would be represented as RIS(HYPHEN)+RIS(ISO639-3
>> code).
>>
>> 4 codes would work with font rendering engines that can build 3
>> successive ligatures from left to right
>>
>> If there's no match for a know flag (or if there's an exact multiple of 4
>> RIS codes), the default glyphs would just show a blank flag frame showing
>> the RIS Code converted back to ASCII letters (rendered with a small
>> capitals style: where the first glyph shows the flag's hoist and the first
>> RIS code and i.e. the hyphen, the 2nd and 3rd gyphs shows the top/bottom
>> part of the blank frame an the ASCII character the 4th glyph is similar but
>> adds the flying end of the flag, possibly decorated with non rectangular
>> frame). If there remains less than 4 RIS codes, the flag frame would add
>> the flying end of the flag, with no letter (or just the SPACE).. The wole
>> would be in a large dotted frame to exhibit the special format.
>>
>> These default glyphs are easy to produce in the font. Then to support
>> more languages (7000 languages : 7000 flags ? certainly not so many
>> exist...), you just have to map new ligatures to replace the default
>> ligatures by more accurate "flags".
>>
>> But my opinion is that "flags" (even ifshowing them generically) are not
>> the cood concept for languages (I would highly prefer a "speech bubble
>> frame" like on comics, even if some applications could render in them a
>> colorful regional flag., or the letter code within the "sonor waves" of an
>> audio speaker device.
>>
>>
>> 2015-02-09 22:11 GMT+01:00 Joan Montané <joan_at_montane.cat>:
>>
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I am the one who made the request to tweemoji Github.
>>>
>>>
>>> 2015-02-09 20:16 GMT+01:00 Markus Scherer <markus.icu_at_gmail.com>:
>>>
>>>> On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 9:54 AM, Andrea Giammarchi <
>>>> andrea.giammarchi_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> > if a cultural/language TLD is typed with Unicode RIS, then show the
>>>>> flag for these culture/language:
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> This does not work. The "Unicode RIS" are defined to be used in pairs,
>>>> with semantics according to corresponding ISO 3166 alpha2 codes. In your
>>>> examples, each successive pair will encode a flag.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> AFAIK, this is done in font side. Emoji flags are just ligatures, so a
>>> font can provide a ligature for 4 RIS characters. This is not an issue here.
>>>
>>> I agree some strange behaviour can appear if a 3 RIS string, take CAT,
>>> is shown in a system with only 2 RIS support (a Canadian will appear
>>> followed by a T).
>>>
>>>
>>> If you want to represent every flag of every locality, you first have to
>>>> figure out how to catalog and label them. You are mentioning provinces, one
>>>> level down from nation states; I guess there are thousands of them. In much
>>>> of Europe, every little village
>>>> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterstadt> has its own flag and coat
>>>> of arms. Where do you want the text encoding and fonts to stop?
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I don't request flag support for every flag in the world. I requested
>>> flags for culture/language communities *with* an approved TLD (Top Level
>>> Domain).
>>>
>>> I know flags are an issue, and I know flags represents territories, not
>>> languages, but I think some support should be done for these active
>>> communities. As I pointed, some country flag collections expand with a fews
>>> non-independent country. See [1], [2] and [3] (search for Scottish or
>>> Welsh flag). You can check this [4] petition requesting Catalan flag on
>>> WhatsApp.
>>>
>>> So, there is a demand and they are used in real world. What's the way
>>> for encoding them in Unicode standard?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Joan Montané
>>>
>>> [1] http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/
>>> [2] https://www.gosquared.com/resources/flag-icons/
>>> [3] http://www.sherv.net/flag-emoticons.html
>>> [4]
>>> https://www.change.org/p/whatsapp-inc-incloure-la-senyera-de-catalunya-a-whatsapp
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Unicode mailing list
>>> Unicode_at_unicode.org
>>> http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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>

-- 
Christopher Vance

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Received on Fri Feb 13 2015 - 00:05:49 CST