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Comment by sacrosancty | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps my history is wrong but it seems like an unfortunate accident that some of these languages must have not had much printing press and typewriter use so they retained their cursive scripts a few decades longer than English and now they're being frozen in time because unicode can accommodate them while they're still popular. I guess the reason we don't care about cursive English unicode is because traditional printing couldn't do it so we've already adapted to separate characters while those Arabs and what-not must have still been writing mostly by hand. Does that sound likely?

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No, this does not match history. Speaking for Indic scripts, which I know best: the first Devanagari books were printed in the 1700s. While this is a few centuries later than Gutenberg's printing press c. 1450, by the time Unicode (or even computers) came into existence, there were already several centuries of "much printing press and typewriter use" (ok, maybe only a century or so of typewriters).

Do you really think "those Arabs and what-not" did not have printing before Unicode condescended to "accommodate them" in 1988? Traditional printing could very well do Indic scripts, and so could typewriters. And so could computers: in fact, Unicode for Indic scripts takes inspiration from ISCII, an Indian standard extending ASCII for encoding scripts on computers, that dates back to 1983.

> Do you really think […]

I downvoted you for this: our guidelines require you to assume the strongest interpretation of the comment you are responding to. From my perspective, you’re comment is needlessly reactionary to a thoughtful, well stated question.

Sorry to include this lecture, but it helps my conscious to avoid drive-by downvoting. I’m very much open to a rebuttal.

Thanks. In fact, I did consider the guidelines: my impulse was to write "Think about what you're suggesting […] Consider whether this really seems plausible", but I thought that's too confrontational/focuses too much on the person, and "Do you really think…" was a softer/more neutral way of phrasing it. Apparently not!

(This is a different part of the guidelines than "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation" BTW: the comment very explicitly suggests non-Latin scripts not having had "much printing press and typewriter use", so I don't think there's much scope for interpretation there. And in fact, the idea is inherently a condescending and colonialist one—of Western superiority over unsophisticated "those" people—even though it may well be held innocently and stated as such. But I do take the point about not responding to the person, and responding kindly to the idea instead. Will try harder, as I think I usually do.)

(BTW "reactionary" means something specific…)

We still disagree, but I appreciate your reply and it is indeed logically consistent. Thanks for the explanation.

Devanagari looks like separate characters to me, just like English. Are you talking about a cursive script where each character's shape has to be modified to link to it neighbors? I'm specifically only talking about cursive scripts, not just any non-English alphabet.

For example, in Devanagari, the sequence

    • U+0915: DEVANAGARI LETTER KA (क)
    • U+093F: DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN I  (ि)

gives कि where the vowel sign not only attaches to the letter, but (in this case) happens to be to the left of it.

Similarly, the sequence

    • U+‎0915: DEVANAGARI LETTER KA (क)
    • U+‎094D: DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA ( ्)
    • ‎U+0937: DEVANAGARI LETTER SSA (ष)
    • ‎U+0941: DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN U ( ु)

gives क्षु where the shapes of the "characters" are indeed modified based on which characters appear next to them.

This is kind of touched upon in the second section in the original post titled "Indic scripts": https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2017/01/15/breaking-our-l...

This is handled in traditional printing (and in modern Opentype fonts) by simply having separate pieces of type for every possible combination of consonants (there are a few hundred, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Devanagari_conjun...), and then having separate pieces of type for vowel signs (which have to have different lengths depending on the width of the consonant cluster, but a handful of lengths for each will do), the same way any good Latin-script font will include ligatures like ﬁ, and will also include separate glyphs for the accent marks (things like ´ ` ¨ ˆ ˜ which can be placed over letters to give é à ü î ñ and so on).

Incidentally, Gutenberg's very first Bible itself used nearly 300 letter forms, including ligatures and variants of several letter (see e.g. https://www.oldbookappreciator.com/libraryofhistoricaltype/e... )

(About "cursive" vs "separate" letters: conceptually it's not such a big difference, because there are only finitely many letters/characters in the script, so as long as you carefully specify the ending position of each glyph for each possible choice of following glyph, you produce the appearance of everything being joined. Indeed that's how traditional printing and modern fonts do it too. And for that matter, cursive fonts in English: try playing with https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cedarville+Cursive which if it had been made with slightly better kerning rules would likely modify shapes of letters depending on adjacent letters. Maybe one of these fonts do it? https://fontsgeek.com/search/?q=cursive )

OK, I just multiplied 26 by 26 and realized that you would only need a few hundred different forms of letters, at worst, to print cursive English that way. Printers could have done that just as they did with Devanagari, so perhaps my whole idea is wrong.

Nothing in Unicode prevents rendering Western languages in cursive. It's just that nobody wants to do the intensive work to generate the layouts and manage the required fonts as was done with Harfbuzz.

There are cursive typefaces for the Latin script, e.g. [1]. There might even be some free ones. Making (good looking) fonts is hard work, but I don’t think making cursive fonts is that much harder.

[1]: https://www.dizajndesign.sk/en/font/skolske

That supports my idea. People don't much care about cursive in English because we're already adapted to isolated characters.

> it seems like an unfortunate accident that some of these languages must have not had much printing press and typewriter use

it wasn't an accident, the printing press was banned by the ottoman empire in 1485.

Or is it actually fortunate? The delay in properly incorporating Arabic into the IT environment gave the rendering infrastructure time to enrich and develop more elaborate textual representation such as advanced ligatures. This means Arabic text rendering has not had to be bent into the plain linear forms that Latin text more naturally falls into.

Instead it's bent into the continuous squiggly curve forms that handwriting naturally falls into but it's not written by hand so it doesn't gain that value.

Western print letters are fairly faithful replicas of western handwriting, specifically that of humanist minuscule (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_minuscule>). Like there's been some ligatures and shorthand, but for the most part, this type of script has always been an extremely printing press-friendly affair with distinct letters of reasonably uniform width.

Cursive has existed alongside print letters going all the way back to antiquity.

True indeed, though it was not these Italian scripts that were first to be printed, but the equally typesetting-friendly Gothic blackletter. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter

But humanist minuscule is not a cursive script: the letters are separate. Cursive does not mean just hand-written, but written in a style designed for haste achieved by not lifting the pen between letters.

Right, my point is they have existed alongside each other almost as long as the latin alphabet as we recognize it. Cursive is a bit younger, but they both trace from antiquity.

Both forms existed before print, during the inception of print, and long after print.

> while those Arabs and what-not must have still been writing mostly by hand. Does that sound likely?

It does sound rather snarky

Do you not see the hypocrisy in your response? I can understand the question seeming blunt, but not snarky.

Your comment on the other hand… /snark

totally disagree. You just don't say "those $other-ethnicity and what-not" where I come from, it sounds super-disrespectful.

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