<story><title>I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode</title><url>https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chimeracoder</author><text>&amp;gt; I could write the author&amp;#x27;s name fine: আদিত্য&lt;p&gt;Author here.&lt;p&gt;Well, yes and no. The jophola at the end is not actually given its own codepoint[0]. The best analogy I can give is to a ligature in English[1]. The Bengali fonts that you have installed happen to render it as a jophola, the way some fonts happen to render &amp;quot;ff&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;ﬀ&amp;quot; but that&amp;#x27;s not the same thing as saying that it actually &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a jophola (according to the Unicode standard).&lt;p&gt;The difference between the jophola and an English ligature, though, is English ligatures are purely aesthetic. Typing two &amp;quot;f&amp;quot; characters in a row has the same obvious semantic meaning as the ﬀ ligature, whereas the characters that are required to type a jophola have no obvious semantic, phonetic, or orthographic connection to the jophola.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0980.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;unicode.org&amp;#x2F;charts&amp;#x2F;PDF&amp;#x2F;U0980.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] Some fonts will render (e.g.) two &amp;quot;f&amp;quot;s in a row as if they were a ligature, even though it&amp;#x27;s not a true ﬀ(U+FB00).</text></item><item><author>sdg1</author><text>Not sure if the l33tspeak analogy is fully justified.&lt;p&gt;In case of the &amp;quot;missing&amp;quot; letter (called khanda-ta in Bengali) for the Bengali equivalent of &amp;quot;suddenly&amp;quot;, historically, it has been a derivative of the ta-halant form (ত + ্ + ‍ ). As the language evolved, khanda-ta became a grapheme of its own, and Unicode 4.1 did encode it as a distinct grapheme. A nicely written review of the discussions around the addition can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2004/04252-khanda-ta-review.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.unicode.org&amp;#x2F;L2&amp;#x2F;L2004&amp;#x2F;04252-khanda-ta-review.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could write the author&amp;#x27;s name fine: আদিত্য. A search with the string in the Bengali version of Wikipedia pulls up quite a few results as well, so other people are writing it too. The final &amp;quot;letter&amp;quot; in that string is a compound character, and there&amp;#x27;s no clear evidence that it needs to be treated as an independent one. Even while in primary school, we were taught the final &amp;quot;letter&amp;quot; in the author&amp;#x27;s name as a conjunct. In contrast, for the khanda-ta case, it could be shown that modern Bengali dictionaries explicitly referred to khanda-ta as an independent character.&lt;p&gt;For me, many of these problems are more of an input issue, than an encoding issue. Non latin languages have had to shoe-horn their script onto keyboard layouts designed for latin-scripts, and that has been always suboptimal. With touch devices we have newer ways to think about this problem, and people are starting to try out things.&lt;p&gt;[Disclosure: I was involved in the Unicode discussions about khanda-ta (I was not affiliated with a consortium member) and I have been involved with Indic localization projects for the past 15 years]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sdg1</author><text>&amp;gt;  The Bengali fonts that you have installed happen to render it as a jophola&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not only the Bengali font - the text rendering framework of my operating system also needs to have a bunch of complex rules to figure out that a jophola needs to be rendered. It also needs to know that the visual ordering of i-kar is before the preceding consonant cluster (দ in আদিত্য).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  the characters that are required to type a jophola have no semantic, phonetic, or orthographic connection to the jophola.&lt;p&gt;Not so sure about that. The fact that it&amp;#x27;s called a &amp;quot;jo&amp;quot;-phola points to a relationship. The relationship may have become less apparent as the script has evolved (though there are words such as সহ্য which makes the relationship more visible), but the distinction is still not as pronounced as between &amp;quot;ta&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;khanda-ta&amp;quot;. For the khanda-ta case, it was explicit from the the then-current editions of the dictionaries produced by the language bodies of both Bangladesh and West Bengal that the character had become distinct (স্বতন্ত্র বর্ণ was the phrase that was used). As far as I know, there hasn&amp;#x27;t been any such claim about jophola from the language bodies. Also, if you look at the collation in Bengali dictionaries, jo-phola is treated as (্+য) for collation.</text></comment>
<story><title>I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode</title><url>https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chimeracoder</author><text>&amp;gt; I could write the author&amp;#x27;s name fine: আদিত্য&lt;p&gt;Author here.&lt;p&gt;Well, yes and no. The jophola at the end is not actually given its own codepoint[0]. The best analogy I can give is to a ligature in English[1]. The Bengali fonts that you have installed happen to render it as a jophola, the way some fonts happen to render &amp;quot;ff&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;ﬀ&amp;quot; but that&amp;#x27;s not the same thing as saying that it actually &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a jophola (according to the Unicode standard).&lt;p&gt;The difference between the jophola and an English ligature, though, is English ligatures are purely aesthetic. Typing two &amp;quot;f&amp;quot; characters in a row has the same obvious semantic meaning as the ﬀ ligature, whereas the characters that are required to type a jophola have no obvious semantic, phonetic, or orthographic connection to the jophola.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0980.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;unicode.org&amp;#x2F;charts&amp;#x2F;PDF&amp;#x2F;U0980.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] Some fonts will render (e.g.) two &amp;quot;f&amp;quot;s in a row as if they were a ligature, even though it&amp;#x27;s not a true ﬀ(U+FB00).</text></item><item><author>sdg1</author><text>Not sure if the l33tspeak analogy is fully justified.&lt;p&gt;In case of the &amp;quot;missing&amp;quot; letter (called khanda-ta in Bengali) for the Bengali equivalent of &amp;quot;suddenly&amp;quot;, historically, it has been a derivative of the ta-halant form (ত + ্ + ‍ ). As the language evolved, khanda-ta became a grapheme of its own, and Unicode 4.1 did encode it as a distinct grapheme. A nicely written review of the discussions around the addition can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2004/04252-khanda-ta-review.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.unicode.org&amp;#x2F;L2&amp;#x2F;L2004&amp;#x2F;04252-khanda-ta-review.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could write the author&amp;#x27;s name fine: আদিত্য. A search with the string in the Bengali version of Wikipedia pulls up quite a few results as well, so other people are writing it too. The final &amp;quot;letter&amp;quot; in that string is a compound character, and there&amp;#x27;s no clear evidence that it needs to be treated as an independent one. Even while in primary school, we were taught the final &amp;quot;letter&amp;quot; in the author&amp;#x27;s name as a conjunct. In contrast, for the khanda-ta case, it could be shown that modern Bengali dictionaries explicitly referred to khanda-ta as an independent character.&lt;p&gt;For me, many of these problems are more of an input issue, than an encoding issue. Non latin languages have had to shoe-horn their script onto keyboard layouts designed for latin-scripts, and that has been always suboptimal. With touch devices we have newer ways to think about this problem, and people are starting to try out things.&lt;p&gt;[Disclosure: I was involved in the Unicode discussions about khanda-ta (I was not affiliated with a consortium member) and I have been involved with Indic localization projects for the past 15 years]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yuriks</author><text>Unicode makes extensive use of combining characters for european languages, for example to produce diacritics: ìǒ or even for flag emoji. A correct rendering system will properly combine those, and if it doesn&amp;#x27;t then that&amp;#x27;s a flaw in the implementation, not the standard. It seems like you&amp;#x27;re trying to single out combining pairs as &amp;quot;less legitimate&amp;quot; when they&amp;#x27;re extensively used in the standard.</text></comment>