Updating D beyond Unicode 2.0

Neia Neutuladh neia at ikeran.org
Sat Sep 22 16:27:57 UTC 2018


On Saturday, 22 September 2018 at 12:24:49 UTC, Shachar Shemesh 
wrote:
> If memory serves me right, hieroglyphs actually represent 
> consonants (vowels are implicit), and as such, are most 
> definitely "characters".

Egyptian hieroglyphics uses logographs (symbols representing 
whole words, which might be multiple syllables), letters, and 
determinants (which don't represent any word but disambiguate the 
surrounding words).

Looking things up serves me better than memory, usually.

> The only language I can think of, off the top of my head, where 
> words have distinct signs is sign language.

Logographic writing systems. There is one logographic writing 
system still in common use, and it's the standard writing system 
for Chinese and Japanese. That's about 1.4 billion people. It was 
used in Korea until hangul became popularized.

Unicode also aims to support writing systems that aren't used 
anymore. That means Mayan, cuneiform (several variants), Egyptian 
hieroglyphics and demotic script, several extinct variants on the 
Chinese writing system, and Luwian.

Sign languages generally don't have writing systems. They're also 
not generally related to any ambient spoken languages (for 
instance, American Sign Language is derived from French Sign 
Language), so if you speak sign language and can write, you're 
bilingual. Anyway, without writing systems, sign languages are 
irrelevant to Unicode.


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list