[Tyler]

The History of Unicode
9 February 2018, 5:00 am



Source: xkcd.com

[infurl]

This isn't funny because it's true.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/unicode-has-launched-a-mango-emoji/news-story/df5a0a828974cecdd216c5bc580a2c96

[ranch vermin]

why not theres plenty of space in it,  it might as well half of it be 0.       there aint that many languages for god to bother making and pretend we are all separate creations.

kiss language goodbye with 16 bits dude.

[infurl]

there aint that many languages for god to bother making and pretend we are all separate creations.

I'm curious. Without looking it up, can you tell me how many languages you think there are?

[ranch vermin]

one per country?  and stuff all words in them.

And in all the english colonized "commonwealth" all the barbarized english in all the monkey languages, cause they cant even do it properly by themselves.

[squarebear]

one per country?  and stuff all words in them.

India has 22 official languages.

[ranch vermin]

that must have been a silly paki idea,    now none of them can communicate properly.

[Art]

Some people in Northern Italy speak a different form of Italian than say, Southern Italy or perhaps Sicily. Similar situation in Germany and many other countries, not counting the various dialects or regional differences.

Think China is just Mandarin and Cantonese? Think again...
For a better explanation check this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China

So before you answer Infurl, you might wish to rethink a bit. 
( That might be similar to a northern USA person saying, "You may" and a southerner saying, "Y'all may.")

[infurl]

You may be surprised to learn that there are more than 7000 officially recognized and documented different languages and dialects still being spoken on Earth today. There used to be a lot more of them but many of the languages that were spoken are now dead, having no living people who use them day to day. Of those 7000 languages, more than 100 languages are considered to be economically significant, in use on a national scale. Here's a list of all the languages which are supported by computer technology.

https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php

Script systems are the symbols used to represent languages in written form and that's where Unicode comes in. There used to be thousands of different "code pages" defined for the different script systems, each one tailored for a particular dialect or language. Before you created a document you had to decide which code page you were going to use and stick to it. It made it very difficult to mix say Chinese and Italian on one page.

Unicode combines all the different script systems into one mapping so any combination of characters can be represented and while it has taken decades to catch on, it has been a boon for everyone working with large numbers of documents from different sources (e.g. anyone using a web browser). Unicode was designed to cater for billions of different symbols so we're not in danger of running out anytime soon.

Or at least, we weren't, until the imbeciles of the world united and began lobbying regulators to use up valuable code space for trivial applications like emojis.

[WriterOfMinds]

Is it theoretically possible to remove some of the, ah, less practical symbols if the Unicode system ever did start running out of room? Or would that create backward-compatibility issues?

[infurl]

Is it theoretically possible to remove some of the, ah, less practical symbols if the Unicode system ever did start running out of room? Or would that create backward-compatibility issues?

The system is quite extensible and was well planned so I don't think it would ever really be a problem. It scales through values having 8, 16 and 32 bits depending on requirements. All the currently known natural languages are covered by values up to 21 bits so there is plenty of room for expansion. Just like the radio spectrum, different ranges of values have been set aside for different purposes and some are even allocated for private or proprietary use, however an application that used those would not be portable between enterprises. It's conceivable that all the codes for emojis could be used up at which point another extension block might be allocated.

It's funny because we never can predict how technology will end up being used. When digital mobile phones were developed, the SMS capability was created as an afterthought. The protocol had a few unused bits of data so they enabled short messages. Now it's one of the major applications of the technology. That, in turn, led to the popularity of emojis. On the other hand, Unicode was deliberately invented to solve an extremely important problem that was presented by the internet, but now the majority of users only seem to care about the emojis it supports.

It's interesting that while so many people know all about emojis, there are so many people who don't appreciate the diversity of languages and cultures. Maybe that's a problem that will eventually be solved by emojis as some sort of universal language. 

[infurl]

Interestingly there are still new languages being discovered every now and then.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/unknown-language-discovered-malaysia-180968099/