And it seems that the Georgians themselves were the ones who pushed for this change: https://unicode.org/L2/L2016/16034-n4707-georgian.pdf. It seems this isn't a case of "ignorant Westerners screwing up Unicode" but "ignorant programmers who don't understand how Unicode works screwing it up," as noted in the sibling comment.
We have English speaking programmers swearing by ASCII despite it not having all the characters needed for English (I can't find it now but there was a report by the Library of Congress that came to that conclusion). I suspect their Georgian counterparts have similar attitudes towards text.
I've heard this argument a few times, and each time it's just as contrived, particularly if you stick to American English. While I'm happy to acknowledge it's not good enough for other languages, ASCII is plenty good for English. Unless you're trying to type cafe with an accented e to be fancy or type that old conjoined-ae character, ASCII is fine for everyday usage. See the fact that most Americans have never installed a separate keyboard layout.
Example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Bill_of_...
Regardless of the technical arguments, from the perspective of non-programmers, when they see things like the CA DMV being incapabale of doing things as simple as recording a diacritic over a person's name, it doesn't reflect well on the software industry and programmers as a professsion.
While true, I think the overwhelming majority of German-Americans anglicized their names several generations ago. For instance, my great-great grandfather switched from Müller to Miller. This is probably less true of more recent arrivals.
The most common English spelling is Kiev. That reflects the English pronunciation. (The British one anyway.)
But many significant European cities with a long history have a different name in English than the local languages: Cologne, Munich, Florence, Naples, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Prague.
In French: Douvres, Londres, Édimbourg.
In German: Edinburg.
In Italian: Edimburgo, Glascovia, Londra, Novocastro, Dublino.
In Chinese: Jiànqiáo (剑桥) (lit. "sword bridge", Cambridge)
Windows-1252 encoding was supported on American computers long before Unicode. I remember “smart quotes” being promoted as a feature of word processors.
Even for people who didn't care for the quotes:
• everyone appreciates ¢, ° for °F or 46° N, ¼, ½, ¾, × and ÷,
• people handling large texts want §, †, ‡ and maybe ¶,
• businesses want ©, ® and ™,
• scientists and engineers need µ, ±, ², ³, ·.
Web browsers have made it more difficult for the average user to enter these characters, but software like Microsoft Word has supported easy ways to insert many of them automatically.
It’s good enough for the style of American English adopted as a concession to typewriter limitations, since that’s pretty much exactly what ASCII is designed to support. OTOH, American English as used outside of that context doesn’t use straight quotes, but rounded ones in each direction with different meaning, uses various diacritical marks, and also uses the cent sign (¢), the obelisk (†), diesis (‡), pilcrow (¶), section sign (§), division sign (÷), multiplication sign (×), less-(and greater-)than-or-equals sign (≤ and ≥), angle brackets (⟨ and ⟩, which aren’t the same as less-than/greater-than symbols), the interrobang (‽), and—the next three distinct from the hyphen—the minus sign, en-dash, and em-dash.
> See the fact that most Americans have never installed a separate keyboard layout.
Common software used for text, like MS-Word, provides convenience methods for many non-ASCII characters without an keyboard layout change.
It means that because the English language uses punctuation and other non-alphabetic symbols, not just letters of the alphabet, as an examination of any substantial corpus of written material in the language not solely consisting of material where the writer was constrained by ASCII (and, heck, even those where they were, though the set of non-alphabetic symbols used would be narrower) would instantly reveal.
> Half you quoted are general math symbols that have nothing to do with English.
5 (7 if you mistakenly include angle brackets, which do have textual, non-mathematical uses) out of 15 is not half, but mathematical symbols are used in written English.
If my weird squiggley that I use in my specific niche field isn't represented by any Unicode code point, does that mean that Unicode isn't good for representing English?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cafe‘: “variants: or less commonly cafe”
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/essential-americ...: “noun (also cafe)”
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cafe also prefers to see the accent
That spelling preference may be shifting. I couldn’t find evidence for it, though.
Really? The data say otherwise: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Cca...
Do you have another source that supports the popularity of the diacritic variant? Rather, café doesn't increase in popularity until after 2000, and thus would appear to be an affectation of sophistication.
Some people just don't care.