Oct 9, 2026, 7:41 AM@dancingtreefrog Indeed. It's why I don't like Unicode. Beyond the consortium gatekeeping what words from which languages make it into their collection of "glyphs", the fact that they just arbitrarily decided that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean were "meh, basically the same thing" sticks in my craw really hard.
It means I can't write a mixed text where it's instantly clear to, say, textual analysis tooling which language I'm using at any given point, for example.
@ZDL Yes, that's a problem. I think they essentially treated most European languages the same way: "They all use the same alphabet except an occasional fiddly bit, so just stick in an occasional fiddly bit into the character set." So you can write text with a mix of English, French, German, etc, with nothing *in the text* that specifically indicates "This word is English, this is French, this is German." What separates a French/German word from "English" text if it doesn't use anything "fiddly"?
Oct 9, 2026, 8:19 AM@dancingtreefrog Yep. All the Latin-based writing systems got stuck together, but that was before Unicode; it inherited that particular mess.
But it didn't inherit the CJK Han Unification mess. There was a Japanese encoding that had that solved BEFORE Unicode existed. And the ISO explicitly binned a solution that Japan came up with, with Korean (and presumably Chinese but I don't know) support and forced Han Unification without consensus of the three nations involved.
Because of course.
@ZDL Oh, yes, colonialist tradition. "You may have had civilizations 2000 years before us, but we know best!"
@ZDL I think that particular mess also came out of colonialist views that UK/France/Germany and derivatives (Netherlands, Belgium, etc) were superior to other parts of Europe (such as Italy, Greece, Russia, Poland, Spain, the nations of the Caucasus, etc). No real need to address the needs of the inferiors except insofar as it impacted the needs of the superiors.
Stupid humans, as if speaking different languages meant you weren't the same humans under it all. 😞