Localizable Sentences Experiment font support

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21

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

22

“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.

23

Thank you.

William

24

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

25

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

lvm

26

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.

27

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!

28

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/pantone.aspx?pg=20706&ca=10

There is “Splashes of sunshine for spring 2010”.

http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/Pantone.aspx?pg=20694&ca=4

Another pdf is “pantone fashion color report fall 2009”.

http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/Pantone.aspx?pg=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.

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

29

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
William Overington

4 February 2010

30

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
William Overington

4 February 2010

31

I have now prepared a Unicode Text Document that contains the poem from earlier in this thread encoded using the symbols.

One way to display the contents is to download the file to local storage, open it in Microsoft WordPad as a Unicode Text Document and then format it using either the Localizable Sentences 008 font or using the Localizable Sentences 007 font as the fonts are the same for the characters used in the poem. I used 24 point at first. I also tried 12 point and the display is good and, on this PC, just fits in the display panel so that all of the poem is displayed at once: that effect was unexpected, yet welcome.

Here is the file.
poem_001.txt
William Overington

5 February 2010

32

I have now written another poem using some of the localizable sentences.

I composed this poem in my mind, in English, as I went along, yet I put it into a WordPad file directly using the plane 15 glyphs that are used to represent the whole sentences, not actually writing down the English version.

I then saved the document as a Unicode Text Document.

One way to display the contents is to download the file to local storage, open it in Microsoft WordPad as a Unicode Text Document and then format it using the Localizable Sentences 008 font.

The display produced is language independent.

Hopefully this poem expresses imagery.

How well would the poem localize into each of a number of natural languages?

Please note that this poem uses one localizable sentence on each line. That is because that is the structure of the poem. If the localizable sentences are used in prose then they would not necessarily, nor usually, be set as one localizable sentence on each line. Also, depending upon the structure of a particular poem, the localizable sentences do not necessarily need to be one localizable sentence on each line.
poem_002.txt
William Overington

5 February 2010

33

My contribution to the use of “blue”.

I am learning Polish and Italian. Both my teachers have explained that in those languages there is no word corresponding to all the meanings of “blue”.

In Polish “niebieski” means “light blue”, “granatowy” means “dark blue”.

In Italian “azzurro” means “light blue”, “blu” means “dark blue”.

Azzurro does not include blu.
Blu does not include azzurro.
Niebieski does not include granatowy.
Granatowy does not include niebieski.

Honest Bern

34

Thank you for your post.

As a result I have produced three image files using Microsoft Paint.

These are each 100 pixels by 100 pixels and are each saved as a .png file.
blue_0_0_255.png
blue_192_224_255.png
blue_0_0_64.png
If asked, in an everyday usage context here in England, to characterize the colour blue, I would think of the top colour in this display.

If asked, in an everyday usage context here in England, to characterize the three colours in this display, I would think of the top colour as Royal Blue, the middle colour as Sky Blue and the bottom colour as Navy Blue.

In colour descriptions in clothes catalogues and the like, the colour Royal Blue is often denoted simply as Royal.

However, that is in an everyday usage context. In precision measurement of colour, those names may have meanings that are different from the colours shown here. However, the localizable sentences would often be being used in an everyday context.

Of the three colours displayed, the top colour is because that is the total blue of the (red, green, blue) system on many computers. The other two colours have (red, green, blue) values chosen by me simply to try to convey the meaning that I have tried to express in this post: so the choices of the (red, green, blue) values of those two colours is just my idea expressed in this post, they are not based on a standard or anything like that.

Maybe I need to define some more localizable sentences for colours?

William Overington

6 February 2010

35

I have now produced the Localizable Sentences 009 font.

I started a palette of additional colours at Alt 1020181. That corresponds to U+F9115.

Add a cell at U+F9115.

U+F9115 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE THE COLOUR IS SKY BLUE.
Centred on (r, g, b) of (192, 224, 255).

Here is the font.
LOCSE009.TTF
William Overington

6 February 2010

36

Some readers might like to know of my post in the comments section of an Adobe blog.

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/02/iphone_ipad_icon_psd_template.html

The post is about the possibility of implementing iPhone and iPad apps using the localizable sentences.

William Overington

8 February 2010

Supplementary note of Monday 6 December 2010

The link has changed.

It is now as follows.

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/02/iphone_icon_psd_template_sf_meeting_tomorr.html

William Overington

6 December 2010

37

Here is a poem that I have written. It includes the new sentence.

U+F9115 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE THE COLOUR IS SKY BLUE.

It is summer.
It is sunny.
The colour is sky blue.
It is summer.
It is raining.
It is summer.
It is sunny.
The colour is red.
The colour is orange.
The colour is yellow.
The colour is green.
The colour is blue.
The colour is magenta.
It is summer.
It is sunny.
The colour is sky blue.

The poem is also available as a sequence of the Private Use Area codes, together with some line break characters, in the attachment to this post.

In order to display the language-independent glyphs for them all one needs to have the Localizable Sentences 009 font installed.
poem_003.txt
William Overington

8 February 2010

38

I like to think of the system that would localize from localizable sentence characters into text in a natural language as in some ways like a font.

A character would be provided as input to the localization database and a complete sentence would be returned.

This is analogous to how a font works in that with a font a character is provided as input to the font and a glyph is returned.

Suppose now that the idea of glyph substitution that is in OpenType fonts were applied to the localization database.

For frequently used sequences of two localizable sentences there could be a mechanism similar to the glyph substitution mechanism of a font in that instead of two independent localized sentences, there would be one localized sentence supplied.

Suppose that there were two localizable sentences, as follows.

There is a flower.
The colour is yellow.

This conveys the meaning that there is a yellow flower.

However, if a localization system were set up so that that particular sequence of two sentences were replaced by one localized sentence, then the output could be as follows.

There is a yellow flower.

This would not be done by trying to extract the word yellow from one sentence and placing it before the word flower in the other sentence as that could lead to great problems.

For example, in English, that approach would not work for the following sequence.

There is a flower.
The colour is orange.

The desired effect would be as follows.

There is an orange flower.

The word an being used instead of the word a because the word orange starts with a vowel.

However, encoding of some specific pairs could be useful, as an end user selectable option.

There would not be Unicode defined code points for the substituted combined sentences, transmission of messages from one place to another would use only the basic sentences.

Certainly, if 500 localizable sentences were implemented then if every ordered pair of sentences could be substituted in this way that would need 250,000 extra sentences and that would not only be impractical but also problem causing and is not being suggested.

Only a relatively small number of such substitutions would be used, just as one only glyph substitutes a relatively small number of ligature pairs in an OpenType font.

In some cases, such as localizing poetry that has been written using localizable sentences, maybe such substitutions would not be desirable, yet maybe for some applications of localizable sentences it could perhaps be a useful technique worth considering.

Whether the technique is useful or not, hopefully it is an interesting matter for thought.

William Overington

10 February 2010

39

Please may I cross-reference the following thread in the support forum.

William Overington

2 June 2011

40

I found that I would like to have a font that also allows access to the glyphs for the localizable sentences from the plane 0 Private Use Area. This is partly so that I can produce a pdf document using Serif PagePlus X3, (which is not the latest version of PagePlus) that does not access glyphs from plane 15 and partly because it may have been a step too far all at once to start with using plane 15 for experiments.

I have now produced the Localizable Sentences 010 font in file named LOCSE010.TTF.

This file adds copies of the glyphs of the 65 symbols thus far in use, mapping them into plane 0.

The mapping structure is to map a glyph originally mapped as U+F9xyz as U+Exyz, where each of x, y, z is here used to represent any chosen hexadecimal character.
For examples, the glyph mapped as U+F900E is now also mapped as U+E00E and the glyph mapped as U+F9022 is now also mapped as U+E022.

I have tested the font using Serif PagePlus X3 using Insert Symbol Other… and achieved good results. I found that using the Show Large Characters option within the Insert Symbol Other… facility was helpful.

Here is the font.
LOCSE010.TTF (53.5 KB)
Hopefully the new mappings and the availability of this font will lead to more experimentation.

William Overington

2 June 2011