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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

Transliterating this character incorrectly resulted in a violent attack causing two deaths:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73

Based on the murderous reaction from the entire family, I doubt the transliteration issue happening or not wouldn't have changed the outcome much. It's a weird consequence of a transliteration issue, but someone prepared to murder someone else over a rude text is a ticking time bomb regardless.

It might seem like an overreaction from a western point of view, but the accusations in the context of Central Asian culture is something so extremely sensitive that people from all walks of life, from nobility to the poor kill and die over it. It is just a different frame of mind.

I'm sorry but stabbing someone over a single text message is not cultural difference, is idiocy.

Honor culture makes people do weird and terrible things. The American cultural version would be the same thing but with a gun.

No matter how much I typically despise American culture, killing people (no matter by which means) over prostitution in an antecedent does not appear to be a part of it.

Please classify the idiotic and non-idiotic reasons for killing an former lover.

"A single text" is an absurd reductionism.

People suffer worst than death over words all the time, even in the West. Some folks adhere to honour, some to political groups and ideologies, some religion, some to their social views; there are words that are treated as violence and responded to accordingly in every context.

Accordingly would be with (violent) words.

Could you tell us where you're from, anyhow?

At least you can defend yourself in that case. For comparison in USA you can go to jail for life if FBI drops a picture on your computer.

It's like a Reddit relationships post, it's highly unlikely the single text message was the whole issue.

This is an overreaction. It's violence. Trying to justify it by claiming it's part of their culture is not healthy, I think we can have some universal values (don't stab people?) and it is perfectly reasonable to force people to adopt to those values. It's their culture? They can leave the violent parts of culture behind and adopt to the expectations of modern society (not stabbing people).

I'm Turkish. I grew up in Turkey. These things happen, but let's not try to justify them. We should aim to get to a point where people share these "western values" (of not stabbing people).

The point of the comment you're responding to is not to justify it, the point is to rebut GP's assertion that the violence would have occurred anyway.

> it is perfectly reasonable to force people to adopt to those values.

No, it isn't (slippery slope fallacy I know), because that's what's happening in western politics as we speak and I for one am Not Okay with it.

The other replies seem to indicate that cultural diversity is fine as long as it's in accord with their culture.

I think you're giving this character a bit too much credit here, I feel like the violent attack might have some causes unrelated to transliteration of some characters.

That doesn't really make sense. "sıkışınca" would become "sikisinca". No one would read it as "sikişince" (the latter a is doing the heavy lifting there). A guy with the same name (I would say not a common name-surname combination considering the same region) was in jail for sexually assaulting a mentally challenged kid. I guess this was just an excuse of a psychopath. https://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/parti-binasinda-ozurlu-ki...

Haha yep. I'm Turkish and been using US layout keyboards my entire life. Therefore, I do not use the Turkish characters online. I use S for Ş. G for Ğ and it just works, nobody ever complained.

One word is to get bored that's causing issues.

sık - to bore sik - to fuck

So if I write "sikildim" to say "I got bored", it actually becomes "I got fucked".

One way around it to capitalize. SIKILDIM is "I got bored" but now you are yelling. Typing "sıkıldım" is a hassle on a US keyboard though.

  The problem was that Emine's cell phone was not localized properly for Turkish and did not have the letter <ı>; when it displayed Ramazan's message, it replaced the <ı>s with <i>s.

Does it make sense? Could the phone arbitrarily replace characters? Or could it more likely that the guy typed dotted i's?

I think the article is somewhat fabrication.

There might be some truth to it but it does not make much sense. Technically, ı would probably show up as □ instead of i if the phone had a hard time displaying it.

There is also the suffix not matching that change: sıkışınca vs sikişince. A becomes E in that suffix when you switch from ı to i. Even if the phone fucked up, "sikişinca" would look weird.

I noticed that countries with latin script use latin-1 encoding for sms, because they never really needed unicode. Then when software converts text to latin-1 or acsii, there's an option to find the best match character in ascii repertoire, I think in that case ı will be converted to i.

It's not latin-1, and it's not ASCII either. It's 7-bit GSM 03.38 charset, with optional shift tables. You can use either that or UCS-2 (though these days phones use UTF-16 instead), and UCS-2/UTF-16 significantly limits the number of characters that fit into the message (160 vs. 70).

No one here understands 'sikisinca' as 'sikişince', because as you can see the final vowel is different. There are cases for these to be mixed though, sikildim May be "I'm fscked" but it's usually understood as "sıkıldım", "I'm bored."

The family being utterly insane was a minor factor.

Shane there was no concept of self defence.

No, crazy people caused the violent attack. If it wasn't the text message it would have been something else.

The cause of this attack was violent psychopaths, not the initial misunderstanding.

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