Re: Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum

On Dec 31, 2:15 am, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Richard Heathfield" <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
Malcolm McLean said:

This whole subject is one for which a very good solution is most unlikely
to gain any ground, because "good-enough" solutions have prevailed for
too  long.

There's another problem with big character sets. Say I wish to send an email
to Foo Ying, in China. The email will be in English, of course, which he
speaks, but being a Chinaman his address is now in the Chinese characters.

As a teacher in China, I advise you that "Chinaman" to refer to a
Chinese person is racist, since it originated in America in the 19th
century, where Chinese men were allowed into California commencing in
the Gold Rush and the construction of the transcontinental railroad as
near slave labor, and not permitted to bring their families, and the
word for a Chinese person was "Chinaman".

Foo Ying is also semiracist since it is an old-fashioned mis-spelling
of a gweilo mispronunciation based on the outdated Wade-Giles
romanization of Chinese. If Ying is the last name it comes first.


However I'm not confident about displaying foo and ying on my computer, I
can't generate the characters on my keyboard, and though I've maybe seen

It's easy. You turn on Windows internationalization and use control
shift sequences.

what they look like, to an English person all Chinese characters look pretty
similar.

Just like all dem flesh and blood Chinese characters, with their
slanty eyes? Har. Chinese characters are of course dramatically
different. They have to be written in a specific way and precisely:
for example, the relative width of the 2 horizontal bars in the
Chinese character for Tian (heaven) have to be correct. The subtleties
replicate and exceed the mix of projective and topological constraints
in writing English characters: just as the inflection point is
required to make 5 look like 5 and not S, there are hundreds of
constraints in Chinese characters which must be learned, and are
learned by your "Chinamen", by exhausting rote practice...which makes
cranking code a snap for these "Chinamen", and which makes them
courteous and fair in dealings with each other, unlike Heathfield and
Howard here, with their arrogant pride in a field which is much easier
to learn.


Then when I see the characters I don't know how to pronounce them,
so I can't go "is that foo, fuh or phew", I've got to say "you mean the one
with the little man and the kind of squiggly bit?". Finally I can't with
confidence even copy them down legibly on a piece of paper. So although it
is maybe physically possible to generate "foo ying" on my machine, actually
I have huge difficulties. I'm probably on the phone to China asking for
advice.

This is what Palestinian intellectual Edward Said called Orientalism:
the unconscious presumption that the default point of view is Western.
FYI, the PURPOSE of a symbolic mechanism is to support the source, not
the margins, and the West is from the Chinese point of view the
barbarian margin. This isn't to say that the West may be oppressed
proportional to the oppression it dealt out to China during the
Century of Humiliation. It is to say when in Rome, do as the Romans
do. Therefore, your needs, while important, shouldn't decide the
representation.



On the other hand if foo ying says "that's ampersand capital F and double Oh
semicolon". I type it in, fire up the browser, and the email is on its way..

And it is even better, I suppose, if he uses Chinglish and says
"yowsah boss".

The representation of which you speak is useful, Mister Dead Inventor
of the Containership, but only from an Orientalist point of view. It
is furthermore based on a truly neutral (which is to say numerical)
representation: unicode. Your friend Zhong Fu has the more important
right, which is to generate the bit mapped Chinese characters with a
keyboard that makes this easy for him. It's your responsibility to be
smart enough, when you get email from him, to switch to HTML and
numerics.

My students struggle 24/7 to master two cultures. Do them the courtesy
of not calling them Chinamen, and not forcing them to use a form of
machine language.


--
Free games and programming goodies.http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgy1mm

.

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