March 18, 2015 at 13:24Not every person can write their name in Unicode
It would seem that all possible and impossible characters have already been included in Unicode. In the latest version of Unicode 7.0, 23 new scripts are added, including the Old Permian script and the almost completely decrypted linear letter A of the Minoan civilization of 2000 BC, hundreds of exotic emoticons.
The total number of characters in Unicode has exceeded 110,000. It would seem that there are already all the common symbols . It turns out that this is not so. There are still people who cannot write their own name in Unicode. They have to resort to various tricks.
An Indian IT specialist spoke about his problem , whose name we cannot correctly print, except in transliteration: Aditya Mukureji.
The guy’s native language is Bengali, it is the seventh most popular language in the world, which is significantly ahead of the number of speakers even Russian. Can you imagine that not all characters of the Russian language are represented in Unicode? But for Bengali, this is a common thing.
Bengali characters
Bengali was introduced in Unicode from the very first version, but from the very beginning it lacked characters. Residents of the country had to invent bicycles, filling up the missing characters when writing with combinations of similar letters and numbers, as in the hacker l33tspeak. So, his own name can be written with a similar grapheme from related scripts: আদিত্য.
Missing letter
In 2005, some characters were added, but not all. His name still lacks a letter, although it is not at all some kind of exotic, but is found everywhere in India and even enters the 1000 most popular names in the USA .
Aditya Mukureji blames the technical incompetence of Unicode consortium staff who are preparing the standard. A bold specialist even makes racist hints. In his opinion, there are too many white English-speaking people among the employees . Insolence can be understood: he, as an advanced user of digital technology, has already suffered a lot in his life because of the “unsuccessful” name.
Aditya fears that the Unicode consortium is not going to change the list of 224,024 characters that it plans to include in Unicode in the coming years.
This story is also an interesting example of the fact that modern technology can not only simplify life, but also complicate it.
The total number of characters in Unicode has exceeded 110,000. It would seem that there are already all the common symbols . It turns out that this is not so. There are still people who cannot write their own name in Unicode. They have to resort to various tricks.
An Indian IT specialist spoke about his problem , whose name we cannot correctly print, except in transliteration: Aditya Mukureji.
The guy’s native language is Bengali, it is the seventh most popular language in the world, which is significantly ahead of the number of speakers even Russian. Can you imagine that not all characters of the Russian language are represented in Unicode? But for Bengali, this is a common thing.
Bengali characters
Bengali was introduced in Unicode from the very first version, but from the very beginning it lacked characters. Residents of the country had to invent bicycles, filling up the missing characters when writing with combinations of similar letters and numbers, as in the hacker l33tspeak. So, his own name can be written with a similar grapheme from related scripts: আদিত্য.
Missing letter
In 2005, some characters were added, but not all. His name still lacks a letter, although it is not at all some kind of exotic, but is found everywhere in India and even enters the 1000 most popular names in the USA .
Aditya Mukureji blames the technical incompetence of Unicode consortium staff who are preparing the standard. A bold specialist even makes racist hints. In his opinion, there are too many white English-speaking people among the employees . Insolence can be understood: he, as an advanced user of digital technology, has already suffered a lot in his life because of the “unsuccessful” name.
Aditya fears that the Unicode consortium is not going to change the list of 224,024 characters that it plans to include in Unicode in the coming years.
This story is also an interesting example of the fact that modern technology can not only simplify life, but also complicate it.