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000013_icon-group-sender _Fri Sep 11 08:22:28 1998.msg
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Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 20:32:54 -0500 (CDT)
From: "John C. Paolillo" <johnp@ling.uta.edu>
Message-Id: <199809110132.UAA02835@ling.uta.edu>
To: gep2@computek.net, icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
Subject: Re: Unicode support or support for non-Ascii based character ma
Cc: john@ling.uta.edu
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
Status: RO
gep2@computek.net wrote:
>Okay, I don't dispute that this move is happening but personally I still don't
>very much like it. The fact is that (at least here in the Western Hemisphere,
>where probably most of the world's computers are used) an eight-bit byte is
>already quite sufficient for most purposes, and doubling it comes at a cost in
>complexity and storage (RAM, disk, tape, whatever) which is simply very, very
>hard to justify on any genuine economic basis. If other countries have more
>difficult (or huge) character sets, that is (while a fact of life) simply an
>inherent disadvantage of their culture (and note that I'm not intending that as
>a slam or value judgement, it just IS the way it is), and I don't see a terribly
>convincing argument why the other countries (without that disadvantage) ought to
>pay the price too, just in order to artificially level the playing field.
This is a shockingly ignorant statement, from a social point of view, and
although I realize that this list is meant for discussion of Icon, and not
social issues or politics, as a sociolinguist who uses Icon in research on
multilingualism online, I cannot let this statement go uncommented.
Computer professionals on the whole show very little awareness that their
decisions about how to implement technical standards within their fields
are inherently valued. The propogation of standards also propogates the
values that led to their selection. Moreover, when our purposes for a given
standard change, we come to discover that what seemed advantageous at
one point is no longer advantageous at another. This is exactly what has
happened with ASCII (more than once) and now Unicode. When we allow
ourselves to look beyond the technical aspects of technical standards, and
look to see the social practices that the computer systems support, we see
the same patterns. This is because the design and the use of standards are
not simply technical practices, they are social practices and they only have
any purpose in a social context.
ASCII is a standard with an undeniable bias toward English. Even the
representation and use of languages such as French (from which English
at one time borrowed a large part of its lexicon) requires extraordinary
means. Around the world, the number of English speakers is growing,
while other languages are disappearing at a rate unprecedented in historic
or prehistoric times. The fact that English is advancing, and the fact that
so much computer technology is biased toward English, is not a value-
neutral fact, as perceived by speakers of the thousands of languages who
face the loss of the continuity of their cultures and histories, while
simultaneously trying to adapt to a world that is changing in ways
completely beyond their control.
A decision to support Unicode, or something like it which allows
for social and technical purposes other than those supported by ASCII,
is a decision that is more sensitive to the values of other potential users.
And this, I think, has been the major trend in computing of recent times;
issues of ease of use, graphical interfaces, etc., have markedly broadened
the social profile of the person who uses computers, and the social
purposes to which they are put.
Not that Unicode will save languages, or that computer professionals
are responsible for the loss of languages, but rather that in a community
of experts such as the Icon group, who have done so much to facilitate the
study and use of other languages, the expression of a sentiment so singularly
unsupportive of other languages seems incongruous.
Respectfully,
John C. Paolillo
Linguistics Program
University of Texas at Arlington