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Comment by jakobnissen | Hacker News Reader

It's US's current cultural trend, which is now enforced on the rest of the world, and also on our descendants who may have different sensibilities.

Maybe the Unicode Consortium should spend their energy on the real problem of third world languages underrepresented in the Unicode standard and spend less energy on the racial and sexual identity of pictograms.

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> also on our descendants who may have different sensibilities

Unicode describes flags of nations that no longer exist, dead languages, etc - I don’t see why having a few pictograms that may or may not be relevant in 1000 years time is the place to draw the line. If skin tones play a role in pictographic communication today, then that’s good enough for inclusion.

Put another way: Unicode seeks to describe all human written language. Emojii is unusual in that TUC is actively playing a role in the evolution of the language, but they’re still trying to describe a written language the way people want to use it. This feature sees a lot of use, which to me says that TUC has correctly described how people want to use pictographic communication.

The problem is that it's not about human language. If it was about human language, the consortium would give a shit about Bengali speakers. It's about the sensibilities of a small, particular group of privileged people, in a particular time at a particular place, who consider their weird priorities to be universal.

Let's not forget that adding all this complexity to Unicode has a real burden for people who implement Unicode. In practice, the consortium has to prioritize what symbols to support. So, in practice, it's less "embracing all variants of human expression", and more "the ability to communicate in your native language doesn't matter as much as the gender identity of this police emoji".

What’s wrong with the Bengali character set? A Google search doesn’t show any discussion on limitations here. And while power and privilege do inevitably play an unintended role in prioritization, Unicode successfully encodes several entirely dead languages - so it’s not like everything not relevant to English speakers has fallen by the wayside.

And while you’re correct that emojii do require some amount of UTC resources, it’s worth noting that most of that work is done by a special subcommittee to not distract from the mainline work of other languages, and that emojii have brought new attention and new volunteers to TUC - so I’m not sure how significant the impact of adding emojii to their workload really is.

The issues with Bengali writing are a large portion of TFA, I would highly recommend reading submitted articles before commenting.

I apologize, I missed your link. But please don’t assume hostility for me missing a URL - I was clearly interested enough in the issue to do a Google search.

In any case, please see the comments on the HN post (linked by a sibling comment) for that. The issue is in fact wickedly complex, and it’s not clear (even among Bengali speakers) that this is a deficiency in Unicode (vs a deficiency in text entry and rendering software).

You appear to be confusing the submitted article with the article linked from a comment, with was put in context (and I'm being extremely charitable to the Bengali article OP with this language) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162

Blog post and interesting HN discussion on Bengali/Unicode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162

I would summarize the key issues here, but they are complex and I don’t feel qualified to do them justice.

> Let's not forget that adding all this complexity to Unicode has a real burden for people who implement Unicode.

We're talking about emoji for crying out loud, the entire idea is frivolous (and that's fine!)

Technically, flag emojis are just two codepoints that encode two Latin letters. They are the “regional indicator symbols”[0]. This solves the problem of countries coming and going, and leaves the job of implementing them all to the font designer (through ligatures), not Unicode.

For example, the US flag is composed(?) as U+1F1FA U+1F1F8 (REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER U) and U+1F1F8 (REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER S).

It can get even crazier with “emoji tags”[1]. Say you want to encode the flag for California, US. You’d think it’d be done using those regional indicators as “CA”, but that’s actually Canada. The way to do it is: U+1F3F4 U+E0075 U+E0073 U+E0063 U+E0061 U+E007F. This encodes a black emoji flag, “USCa” in tag characters, and a “tag cancel” code point.

Basically, if your font has symbols for countries that don’t exist yet, or are missing some, that’s on the font designer, not Unicode.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)

True, but Unicode does say that all alpha-2 codes are valid. So while Unicode isn’t saying “this is a list of countries you need flags for”, they do say “go here to find the list of countries you need flags for” - which is mostly a (reasonable) decision to punt political pressure onto somebody else :)

So all that to say: Unicode is still representing language and/or written culture as it is at a point in time (which may be less relevant in the future) - and that’s OK, and absolutely compatible with their aims.

I'm just happy we have three ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic penises in Unicode. Mobile keyboard developers need to step up and make them more easily accessible, though.

I'm not american, I'm African but I find the black toned emojis to be ideal for me, I wish all face emoji's were available in other skin tones.

My hope is that our children transcend this division and look back with bewilderment.

The Unicode Consortium is a consortium, big enough to work on multiple issues at once. If you think the consortium should work on third world languages, then you should join the consortium and work on third world languages.

https://www.unicode.org/consortium/joinform.html

This doesn't at all track as an argument. The US government is far larger than the Unicode Consortium, and I do feel that the government should work on fixing some of our crumbling infrastructure. That does not at all mean I should join the government to do so. Moreover, any number of people in this thread believe they should work on skin tone variants; should they all join to advance that work?

Actually, participating in your local government is a pretty effective way to ensure that your viewpoint is represented.

It's true that "any number of people" in this tread believe that the consortium's efforts towards skin tone variants are a good thing. Is anybody here calling for more work to be done in this area? Those are the people who I'd make a similar recommendation to.

Why do these require much energy? Unicode is big, why not just add everything? I still am pissed of by the fact they rejected Tengwar - how much energy would it take to add (id nobody opposed)?

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