Localizable Sentences Experiment font support

[William]

Here is a cross-reference to a post in the thread Fonts in use in Châlons-en-Champagne where there are some notes in relation to using Google Streetview in relation to using localizable sentences to seeking directions to a pharmacy.

viewtopic.php?p=12127#p12127

The next but one post in the same thread is also of relevance in relation to the notes.

The link to the whole thread is as follows.

viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2862

William Overington

18 January 2010

[vanisaac]

You suggested that I contact the Department of Lingusitics at a particular University and I asked the following question.

Yet is it going to be that once I get interested that I am going to be rejected by the system because I am not a linguist or do not already know some things or because I am not representing an organization?

It was a question.
Again, thank you for replying.

William Overington

18 January 2010

Which I think really gets at the heart of why people are not reacting as you would like. You never visited the link. If you had, you would have seen the web page http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei ... -list.html was just a list of currently unencoded scripts, and one of the data fields was whether there is a current proposal underway - you should email the person who maintains the list, just in case she knows about something not represented on the page. That's it, but you never showed the necessary interest. Same thing with the book Michael Everson suggested. There's no evidence that you took a look at it, or tried to respond to the theoretic issues contained therein. That's a lack of respect for people whose lives are entwined with this endeavour, and does not serve you well.

I've never read the book, and I can already tell you about two distinct areas which point to the theoretical impossibility of what you are trying to do: 1) terms which you think are universal, like colors, are actually language dependent. What we consider to be natural color distinctions may have distinctly different status in other languages - "brown" in just about any other language comes to mind. There is no sentence for the most commonly uttered response to a yes/no question in Japanese, "ee", and without knowing or understanding the language or culture, you would have no reason to even imagine such an inclusion, let alone appreciate its importance. But it doesn't really translate outside of the culture and language that depends on it. 2) Language communities communicate a large amount of information sub-textually, through connotation. If I said "The mountain is out", that would probably not mean anything to you unless you had lived in Western Washington. You may think your sentences are - unambiguous, but there are connotations to nearly every word, and would require either exceedingly large "sentences" to express in most every language, in order to eliminate ambiguous connotations, or the acknowledgement that the sentences are inadequate for a great deal of communication.

[William]

Which I think really gets at the heart of why people are not reacting as you would like. You never visited the link.

I did visit the link and looked at the page for some time.

If you had, ...

Well, I did visit the link.

... you would have seen the web page http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei ... -list.html was just a list of currently unencoded scripts, and one of the data fields was whether there is a current proposal underway - you should email the person who maintains the list, just in case she knows about something not represented on the page.

I asked a question. As I am not a linguist and the page was for a university department of linguistics I feel that that was a perfectly reasonable question to ask. You answered the question. I got the answer. Thank you.

That's it, but you never showed the necessary interest.

Well, I was interested, I am interested, but I did not understand exactly how I could participate.

Same thing with the book Michael Everson suggested. There's no evidence that you took a look at it, or tried to respond to the theoretic issues contained therein.

I looked at the author's webspace and read the excerpts that are provided there. I thought about getting the book but was deeply deterred by the use of the word "mad" in the title. Also, I felt that I was being told to go and look in a book when I felt that I could quite easily have been told something in the thread and there was no reference to where to look in the book. Also, the first post after mine in the thread had made me wary.

That's a lack of respect for people whose lives are entwined with this endeavour, and does not serve you well.

Well, I asked a question as I was unsure of applying when I am not a linguist and one man had first tried to make out that my post was an April fool's joke and would not tell me anything other than to read a book that has the word "mad" in the title. How is that lack of respect by me? Can you find any evidence of impoliteness or lack of respect in any of my posts either in this forum or in the Unicode list? I had to put up with two people publicly making out that my posts were an April Fool's joke and one more implying it.

I've never read the book, and I can already tell you about two distinct areas which point to the theoretical impossibility of what you are trying to do: 1) terms which you think are universal, like colors, are actually language dependent. What we consider to be natural color distinctions may have distinctly different status in other languages - "brown" in just about any other language comes to mind. There is no sentence for the most commonly uttered response to a yes/no question in Japanese, "ee", and without knowing or understanding the language or culture, you would have no reason to even imagine such an inclusion, let alone appreciate its importance. But it doesn't really translate outside of the culture and language that depends on it. 2) Language communities communicate a large amount of information sub-textually, through connotation. If I said "The mountain is out", that would probably not mean anything to you unless you had lived in Western Washington. You may think your sentences are - unambiguous, but there are connotations to nearly every word, and would require either exceedingly large "sentences" to express in most every language, in order to eliminate ambiguous connotations, or the acknowledgement that the sentences are inadequate for a great deal of communication.

Thank you for informing me of the problems.

Well I do acknowledge that the sentences are inadequate for a great deal of communication.

They are just an attempt to try to enable a little communication across language barriers.

The emoji are fun and people enjoy using them. They do not cover every picture in the world. For example, there is no picture of an okapi and there is no picture of a Davidia Involucrata. Yet the emoji are used and are fun. So I thought that some localizable sentences would be useful to have as well.

William Overington

19 January 2010

[William]

I have been looking into the matters about language that were raised earlier in this thread. I have reached no conclusions at this time, I am just mentioning some links that I have found interesting in the hope that some readers might also find them interesting.

What we consider to be natural color distinctions may have distinctly different status in other languages - "brown" in just about any other language comes to mind.

As a result of the thread in the Unicode mailing list an email correspondent kindly sent me two links, as follows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity page has a section Color terminology research that includes links to the following.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universali ... erminology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_color_term

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity page has the following link in its "See also" section.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Colo ... _Evolution

Although not about colour in the same way, some readers might like my including of a mention that a webspace about colour is as follows.

http://www.pantone.com

There is no sentence for the most commonly uttered response to a yes/no question in Japanese, "ee", and without knowing or understanding the language or culture, you would have no reason to even imagine such an inclusion, let alone appreciate its importance.

I found the following web page.

http://japanese.about.com/library/blqow8.htm

William Overington

21 January 2010

[vanisaac]

I found the following web page.

http://japanese.about.com/library/blqow8.htm

William Overington

21 January 2010

'
It's been too long since I took Japanese (>10 years). It's "nn", not "ee". My bad. I should stick with Latin and Greek.

[William]

It's "nn", not "ee".

Alright.

Moving forward.

Could you explain the problem with nn please? I had a quick look on the web, but, thus far I cannot find anything.

The sentences in the experimental set thus far include the following.

U+F9012 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE NO.

U+F9013 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE YES.

U+F9014 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE INDEFINITE NO.

U+F9015 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE INDEFINITE YES.

U+F9016 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE I DO NOT KNOW.

U+F9017 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE I NEED MORE INFORMATION IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO ANSWER.

U+F9018 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE I REFUSE TO ANSWER.

Please know that I am approaching this as research. I am interested to know the limits to the localizable sentences experiments that I have suggested. Maybe the idea will be as impossible as some people have suggested but if that is the case I feel that I need to have that proven.

I hope that I do not seem unreasonable in not taking other people's word for it. I do have experience with one of my other ideas long ago when some people told me that it would not work, but it did and today it is in use. However, I was not there going from one academic discipline area to another. I am quite ready to accept the possibility that the localizable sentences will not work if significant specific situations are found that cause the idea to crash.

The situation with colours is interesting.

Yet I am wondering in which languages the localization of the sentence "The colour is brown." would cause a problem.

William Overington

21 January 2010

[vanisaac]

It's "nn", not "ee".

Alright.

Moving forward.

Could you explain the problem with nn please? I had a quick look on the web, but, thus far I cannot find anything.

The sentences in the experimental set thus far include the following.

U+F9012 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE NO.

U+F9013 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE YES.

U+F9014 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE INDEFINITE NO.

U+F9015 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE INDEFINITE YES.

U+F9016 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE I DO NOT KNOW.

U+F9017 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE I NEED MORE INFORMATION IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO ANSWER.

U+F9018 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE I REFUSE TO ANSWER.

Please know that I am approaching this as research. I am interested to know the limits to the localizable sentences experiments that I have suggested. Maybe the idea will be as impossible as some people have suggested but if that is the case I feel that I need to have that proven.

I hope that I do not seem unreasonable in not taking other people's word for it. I do have experience with one of my other ideas long ago when some people told me that it would not work, but it did and today it is in use. However, I was not there going from one academic discipline area to another. I am quite ready to accept the possibility that the localizable sentences will not work if significant specific situations are found that cause the idea to crash.

The situation with colours is interesting.

Yet I am wondering in which languages the localization of the sentence "The colour is brown." would cause a problem.

William Overington

21 January 2010

"Nn" means something along the lines of "Yes, I understand what you have said, and don't wish to cause any sort of confrontation or offense by answering 'no', but also don't want to be understood as having agreed, but I don't think there is any use in pursuing this further, unless you really think there is reason to." That's just a general translation, based on my experience with native speakers, and it is highly imperfect because the term is dependent on Japanese concepts of politeness, non-confrontation, and status. Off the top of my head, I can think of over half a dozen words for "give" and "receive" in Japanese, and if I could find the table in my notes from high school, I could give you a good dozen more. The point, and I think this really is a particularly intractible theoretical problem with the whole idea, is that language is not just a collection of words with unambiguous meanings. Language really cannot be understood except in terms of a culture. When you learn a foreign language, you don't just learn a bunch of words and rules for how they fit together - you have to learn a worldview and a cultural perspective to understand and properly speak/write a language.

The problem with "brown" is that the concept really doesn't exist in a lot of languages. If you ask me if something is brown, I would say "yes" to a whole host of options including umber, tan, dark crimson, dark ochre, and a whole bunch of other things. There is no term in most languages that comes even close to covering that same complement of ideas. The concept of "brown" is incredibly dependent on cluture. Most colors that we would consider "green" would be considered by people who only speak many east asian languages as being blue. I'm not even going to get into the experiments that show that language determines a person's ability to remember a distinct color. What you consider to be an incredibly simple distinction is actually an incredibly complex one for a lot of other people, and that's ignoring social connotations that are basically impossible to remove from every word we speak.

[William]

Thank you.

William

[LVManess@Comcast.net]

If you rephrase the problem into a scientific concept, there is, indeed, an universally understandable meaning of the word/color "brown," as well as any number of other troublesome linguistic constructs. It all depends upon a scientific definition, which in regards to colors is commonly expressed quantitatively, where each of 256 cubed possible variants are specifiable. White, for example is expressed as RGB (red, green, blue) = 255,255,255; black as 0,0,0; red as 255,0,0; green as 0,255,0; blue as 0,255,0; and various shades of "brown" as somewhere closer to black than to the other possibilities.

My point is that all the colors that man can perceive can be unequivocally, unambiguously, quantified and defined -- and so can other linguistic variables.

Elimination and/or minimization of ambiguity is a major concern in science. Most of the culturally-influenced variables to communication lend themselves to ready quantitative, unambiguous, scientific expression which are totally, immediately understandable across cultural boundaries. That is one of the major driving forces behind my creation of the (copyrighted) MIG Font.

Society needs more people asking these types of questions and proposing answers.

Good luck!

Lindsey V. Maness, Jr., Geologist

[LVManess@Comcast.net]

Oops! I incorrectly defined the color "blue." It is actually 0,0,255.

lvm

[vanisaac]

The problem is that if you asked a speaker of an actual language whether something is blue, that person doesn't see color in terms of a scale of three independent variables, each representing one of the primary colors, and each with one of 256 distinct values; they say that something is blue, be it the sky on a clear day - which is probably more along the lines of 150,150,215 - or any of the colors found in this forum's theme (except for the cross of the H). The problem with blind translation is that languages classify even the most basic of elements quite differently from each other, and a basic category in one language will be a collection of quite dissimilar things in another. I may be running to the edge of Sapir-Whorff here, but the idea holds. Trying to port the vagueries of television and monitor technology onto a phenomenon as intrinsically human as language really doesn't seem wise, and it actually makes one of my main points: In order to be universal, you have to make the definitions so restrictive, that you no longer have a reasonable means of communicating. Defining blue as 0,0,255 and nothing else doesn't actually encompass much of the idea of blue at all.

[LVManess@Comcast.net]

You put your finger precisely on the problem that has to be resolved in order to have universally understandable communications, whether it be through a font or other media/means: ambiguity. To use the "blue" example, in order to have a "blue" color on your computer monitor, it must be defined precisely for computer program or programs to properly process and display. Since we are both using a computer monitor and all use variants of the above (even the CMYK does!), it is clear that people with different languages and cultures can and do intentionally express themselves in universally understable quantitative forms! Yes, there are many variants of "blue," with many different names (e.g., aquamarine, a gemstone which I have mined), and which can also be expressed quite precisely in quantiative terms, along with as many other shades of "blue" as one wishes to define. In addition, statistical approaches to definitions can also be fruitfully applied when precise definitions fail. For example, a point can be plotted on the RGB ternary diagram, or as a point on an x,y,z graph and automatically assigned to the "nearest neighbor." Even the nearest neighbor can be weighted, statistically. In other words, an RGB of 5,7,252 might be nearest to "blue" and be "classified" as "blue." Therefore, statistical operands can, indeed, resolve linguistic ambiguity as desired! This is what is done in image classification algorithms, as for example in remote sensing (a field which I helped to create in the 70s). Each separate culture/language/... can define its own parameters, whose overlaps of other parameters can also be quantitatively expressed, both heuristically and statistically. So, the goal of more precisely and universally defining the meanings of symbols is, indeed, not just possible, but highly desirable! For only one of many examples (which I solved in my copyrighted MIG Font), most fonts use the hyphen symbol (-) to be the same as the minus symbol (-), which can cause severe problems with computer programs. With this particular example (hyphen/minus), it is only necessary to create separate distinctive symbols and to uniquely define them; however, I agree that educating people to follow the stated rules to differentiate concepts can be quite difficult. Other examples include the letter El "l" and the number One "1" (which on this font are different -- but not on some of the more popular fonts), the letter Oh "O" and the number zero "0," etc. When one extends this across languages, as I have done with my copyrighted MIG Font, eliminating/minimizing ambiguity becomes a routinely solvable problem which must be systematically addressed to derive sound scientific conclusions. By the way, I can "get by" in several languages, so fully appreciate the difficulties you describe. Notwithstanding, the difficulties communicating across linguistic and cultural barriers can be overcome through scientific means. A font for scientific use must be far more rigorous than a slap-dash application of an existing, traditional art and craft!

[William]

This thread seems to be getting a good number of views. I noted 717 just before starting to post this post.

Colours can be quite specifically defined yet also have names that can be used in everyday speech.

The web page "Turquoise, Pantone colour of the year for 2010" is available.

http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/pa ... 0706&ca=10

There is "Splashes of sunshine for spring 2010".

http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/Pa ... 20694&ca=4

Another pdf is "pantone fashion color report fall 2009".

http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/Pa ... 20644&ca=4

The pdfs contain, on the last page of each, scientific details in CMYK format that are linked to the names that can be used in everyday speech.

There are more of the reports for some earlier years from a list in the left column of the page about Turquoise mentioned earlier in this post.

Sometimes, when I am feeling artistic, I like to try designing logos to represent specific colours such as these.

I think in terms of designing the logos so that they could be encoded into a font so that they could be used in a monochrome document.

I try to design a logo so that it gives a hint of the meaning by basing designs on those used for some basic colours in the Petra Sancta system used in some books about heraldry.

Thinking in terms of use in a font, particularly at smaller sizes such as in a document, means that I try to produce a clear distinctive design.

I find a pleasant relaxation in trying to achieve such designs.

On the matter of languages, there is a translation facility at the following web page.

http://www.google.co.uk/language_tools?hl=en

I have tried a round-trip of the following sentences from English to another language and back to English for various far-eastern languages.

The colour is brown.
The colour is blue.
The colour is green.

I do not understand the various far-eastern languages, and various non-Latin characters are used for some of them, yet the sentences seem to perform the round-trip satisfactorily, even though there are minor differences. For example, "The colour is brown." may produce "Color is brown." in the round-trip.

In relation to discussion about what is impossible, is the constructed auxiliary language Esperanto regarded as satisfactory?

Many years ago I read a book about the inventor of Esperanto, Dr L. L. Zamenhof. The book is entitled "The Life of Zamenhof" and is authored by E. Privat.

Esperanto uses some accented characters that are only used in Esperanto, and these are encoded as characters in Unicode.

William Overington

2 February 2010

[William]

Previously I wrote as follows.

quote

For example, last Saturday it was very windy here first thing in the morning, and I thought that I would add a sentence for "It is windy." to the set of localizable sentences, so I thought that I would add localizable sentences for "It is hailing." and "It is foggy." at the same time. So I then started to think of what I would use for language-independent glyphs for them. I have not yet decided on that yet, but it is fun for me to do, as art.

end quote

In the event I produced a new font on Saturday 23 January 2010 and have been trying it out.

Add the following.

U+F9025 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IS IT WINDY?

U+F9026 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IS IT HAILING?

U+F9027 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IS IT FOGGY?

U+F9035 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IT IS WINDY.

U+F9036 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IT IS HAILING.

U+F9037 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IT IS FOGGY.

Save a copy of LOCSE007.TTF as LOCSE008.TTF and change the name and date using Tools AutoNaming... and also add 2010 into the date in the copyright field in two platforms.

Use copies of the sentences about snowing to intially populate the six glyphs. There are codepoint glyphs already in the font so no new positions need to be defined.

U+F9025 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IS IT WINDY? Alt 1019941

U+F9026 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IS IT HAILING? Alt 1019942

U+F9027 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IS IT FOGGY? Alt 1019943

U+F9035 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IT IS WINDY. Alt 1019957

U+F9036 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IT IS HAILING. Alt 1019958

U+F9037 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE IT IS FOGGY. Alt 1019959

I am wondering about the designs that I devised for the two sentences about hailing. Some time after producing the font I found a web page about wheather symbols where a symbol similar to the tilde-like part of the symbol is used for something like drizzle.

However, the font does make some progress and so I am making it available in the hope that some readers may like to download it and try it. The alternative is that it would just sit in a folder on this computer.

I am interested to observe how many people download the font. I intend making one download myself so as to test that the upload and the download has worked properly.

LOCSE008.TTF

Localizable Sentences 008 font

(35.46 KiB) Downloaded 108 times

William Overington

4 February 2010

[William]

Here is a file containing the six characters, set out on two lines with three characters on each line. It was generated using Microsoft WordPad and saved as a Unicode Text Document.

Readers wishing to use the file need to download it and then open it using Microsoft WordPad as a Unicode Text Document.

The characters may then show as either black rectangles or as black rectangles each with six tiny hexadecimal characters in them. They then need to be reformatted using the Localizable Sentences Experiment 008 font. I used 24 point. I also tried 48 point. Some readers might like me to mention that the font needs to be downloaded and then installed for that to work, yet that installation need only be temporary on a PC so one can just double click on the font file and open it for display and that should be enough for it to work: however, opening the font in that manner probably needs to be done before the WordPad program is started so that WordPad can detect that the font is installed.

locse008_test.txt

Unicode Text Document that includes six plane 15 characters

(34 Bytes) Downloaded 101 times

William Overington

4 February 2010