[HN Gopher] Making the Tibetan language a first-class citizen in...
___________________________________________________________________
Making the Tibetan language a first-class citizen in the digital
world
Author : thunderbong
Score : 97 points
Date : 2024-10-13 17:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bdrc.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bdrc.io)
| java-man wrote:
| I want to know the details how they achieved it (the support for
| super-long paragraphs, or rather, the absence thereof).
|
| Does anyone know?
| l1n wrote:
| https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/172801
|
| Pretty short change for reducing O(n^2) impact with a cache.
|
| This change includes the following scalability improvements for
| documents containing extremely large paragraphs:
|
| - Reduces the size of layout contexts to account for LF control
| chars.
|
| - Due to typical access patterns while laying out paragraphs,
| VCL was making O(n^2) calls to vcl::ScriptRun::next(). VCL now
| uses an existing global LRU cache for script runs, avoiding
| much of this overhead.
| java-man wrote:
| Thank you. Also
| https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92064
|
| I lack the context - are they still layong out the widths of
| characters when wrapping?
| wslh wrote:
| With all due respect, the innovation side of Tibetans is also
| appreciated in "The Nine Billion Names of God" [1].
|
| [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God>
| asimovfan wrote:
| i don't know how it is phrased in the book itself but in
| Tibetan Buddhism there is no god. And their innovation is far
| beyond this book (at least the plot summary on wikipedia).
| wslh wrote:
| If I were a Tibetan Buddhist, I might say we were just having
| some fun with Arthur C. Clarke's imagination.
| dymk wrote:
| Unsong takes inspiration from this as well -
|
| https://unsongbook.com/
| sol2070 wrote:
| Classic!
| hyperhello wrote:
| This has been in the works for a while. There is an old HyperCard
| stack to teach Tibetan pronunciation (with 16bit sound) you can
| try: https://hcsimulator.com/Learn-Tibetan
| fsckboy wrote:
| the only vowel is AH ?
| cosignal wrote:
| The site seems incomplete. Tibetan does have 5 vowels, and it
| looks like the non intrinsic vowels are written at the bottom
| section of the view, but I can't get them to work. I assume
| the intention would be that you click one of the other vowels
| to toggle it, but it no worky.
| hyperhello wrote:
| I don't know who created it, or if it was part of a larger
| proto-Duolingo language product.
| shanekandy wrote:
| In text, the singular vowels are built on the ah syllable
| with modifying marks.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Tibet as a land and people should be made a first class citizen
| of the physical and political world as well. I am not sure why
| the Free Tibet movement died out in America and Europe, but less
| than 75 years ago, China forcibly and illegally took over Tibet
| and since then has been engaged in a forced reeducation and
| erasure of the people and their culture (Sinicization):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_Peo...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization_of_Tibet
|
| This is one of the great injustices of the world, and
| unfortunately the Tibetan leader (the real Dalai Lama) had to
| flee and live in exile in India.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| > I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out in America
| and Europe
|
| Realism. Movements without a realistic goal tend to become
| quite niche, unless there's another hook to keep them going.
| With the rise of China as an economic and nuclear power, and
| one with no interest in even talking about Tibet as something
| other than a part of their empire, a populist movement to
| pressure politicians to "Free Tibet" is about as useful as a
| populist movement to get politicians to conquer the concept of
| entropy.
|
| People, even very passionate and politically active people,
| moved on to causes with at least _some_ hope, or at least the
| perception of hope.
| g-b-r wrote:
| What? From my recollection, when it was decided to admit
| China in the WTO, every problem was set aside for the
| asserted belief that growth would result in democracy, human
| rights and hence the solution of those problems.
|
| By the time it became clear that things wouldn't have gone
| that way, the west had bound itself to China too much to be
| able to do something about Tibet (without reshoring the
| manufacturing).
| justin66 wrote:
| > I am not sure why the Free Tibet movement died out in America
| and Europe
|
| The US could have conditioned most favored nation trade status
| for China on improving its behavior in Tibet, could have kept
| them out of the WTO, etc. That would have cost the wrong people
| money.
| modernpink wrote:
| The claim of the Tibetan people to sovereignty is much greater
| and obvious than the Palestinian/Arab claim to the Holy Land.
| Yet one is swept under the carpet and the other is loudly
| amplified as a legitimate (and morally required) cause on
| college campuses.
|
| The same is true for a number of other causes which upset the
| CCP such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Inner Mongolia,
| Manchukuo/Manchuria and East Turkmenistan/Xinjiang. These all
| seem to be politely ignored in discussions of ongoing genocide.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| It's also weird that Xinjiang and the Uyghur genocide get
| almost no commentary from the Arab Islamic world, even though
| the scale of violence against Muslims is far greater than the
| Israel-Arab conflict, by several orders of magnitude. To me
| it looks a lot like antisemitism - the smaller conflict
| matters only because it involves Jews.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Far greater is very debatable, you get a similar number of
| killings only if the organ harvesting allegations are true.
|
| The Arab-islamic world is made up of autocracies; they
| don't need to care about a lot, and they indeed showed
| extremely little concern for the Palestinians as well.
| g-b-r wrote:
| How is it much greater?
|
| Greater, maybe yes, since more decades passed since the
| Palestinians expulsion.
|
| Or maybe not, because Tibetans at least can still live there?
|
| Either way, I don't see how can it be much greater
| pests wrote:
| This is also not a competition.
|
| We can help all these groups. The answer to "lets help
| group A" shouldn't be "but what about group B".
|
| There are tons of groups, from A-Z, who have been wronged
| in one away or another.
|
| To not help one group because so many others are also
| wronged in maybe worse ways is not productive at all.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Exactly.
| debit-freak wrote:
| This sentiment that tibet somehow deserves more consideration
| than, say, native american nations always rang hollow to my
| ears. The only reason people care about tibet in particular (or
| taiwan for that matter) is some bullshit about china somehow
| being in conflict with the us.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Is anyone suggesting first people's in North America deserve
| less consideration than Tibet?
|
| I've heard concerns about both Tibet and treatment of first
| peoples in the US (historical and at present).
| Retric wrote:
| There's an expiration date on being able to do anything on
| this kind of conquest and forceful relocations.
|
| I'm personally more concerned with China's genocide of the
| Uyghur because you can't undo such atrocities after a
| population is gone as happened to many Native American
| populations. There's a few relatively tiny "Native American"
| populations that are still genetically distinct, but a wide
| range of cultures have been effectively erased with only
| fragments remaining. Hundreds of dead languages we don't even
| know enough about to classify let alone stories.
|
| Imagine if everything from Spain to Japan was referenced as
| Eurasian culture and thrown into basically the same bucket.
| hash872 wrote:
| As OP notes, the 'Free Tibet' cause was very popular in the
| 90s when the US was not seen as being in a great-power
| conflict with China. So I don't think your 2nd sentence is
| correct. Your 1st sentence is just classic whataboutism
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Native Americans have far more consideration than Tibetans
| do. They are free to live per their culture. They can
| practice their religion. They can use their language. They
| are afforded every right American citizens are. There are
| several hundred Indian reservations, totaling something like
| 2.5% of US soil.
|
| This is by no means a justification for the genocide of
| native Americans or a way to say they've been made whole. But
| there is simply no fair comparison between their situation
| today (despite huge injustices in the past) and the situation
| of Tibetans.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| Or say the kingdom of Hawaii which the US (by it's own
| acknowledgement)[1] illegally took a little over 100 years
| ago...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_Resolution
| Tainnor wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree with you politically (with what little I
| know about this conflict which admittedly is... almost
| nothing), but I don't think this kind of political discourse is
| very appropriate for HN. You can already see from some of the
| replies to your comment how the quality of the discussion
| deteriorates.
| skybrian wrote:
| Apparently "documents have reasonably short paragraphs" should be
| added to "falsehoods programmers believe about text."
| pbronez wrote:
| I never thought about this element of cross language structure
| before. Text direction, diacritics, punctuation, sure - but I
| always assumed that chunking was universal. Turns out no:
|
| "the typographical notion of the paragraph does not really
| exist in a Tibetan text the way it does in European languages.
| As a result, Tibetan texts often need to be processed as a long
| stream of uninterrupted text with no forced line breaks,
| sometimes over hundreds or thousands of pages. "
| einpoklum wrote:
| Hey everyone, I'm a LibreOffice project volunteer who does a lot
| of QA regarding Right-to-Left and Complex-Text-Layout scripts (=
| written languages). I just want to thank thunderbong3 for posting
| a link to that post - and a big thanks to Jonathan Clark, the new
| RTL-CTL-CJK-focused developer at The Document Foundation.
|
| Most bugs we encounter and report in LibreOffice are more
| general, and aren't script specific (e.g. code which forgets that
| the content may be right-to-left resulting in wrong behavior in
| those cases); and a lot of the script-specific bugs are about the
| most popular script, which is Arabic (that is also used for
| Farsi, Urdu, Javanese etc.)
|
| But we do have some issues regarding less-commonly-used scripts,
| like Tibetan or Mongolian. Here:
|
| https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115607
|
| is the meta-bug which tracks issues with: Mongolian, Tibetan,
| Uyghur, Zhuang,Kazak, Xibo, Dai, Yi, Miao, Jingpo, Lisu, Lahu,
| Wa, etc.
|
| We don't know if there are really very few issues specific to
| those languages (which is quite possible), or whether it's just
| that they're not used so much and the users aren't motivated
| enough to file bugs.
|
| Still, as Jonathan's recent fix demonstrates, there is certainly
| the interest to address them when developer-time-resources become
| available.
|
| I would like to encourage everyone who cares about these scripts,
| and "document editing fairness" across countries and cultures, to
| consider:
|
| 1. Try using LibreOffice with such languages which you know at
| least a little bit of - and if you find any bugs, file them at
| our BugZilla: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/
|
| 2. Consider supproting The Document Foundation, which manages the
| LibreOffice project, financially:
|
| https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
|
| We are one of the larger FOSS projects in the world, with tens of
| Millions of regular users (if not > 100 Million) and a board of
| trustees with members from dozens of countries; but - we don't
| have large corporations investing money nor time in the project.
| While a few commercial companies do contribute to LibreOffice
| (like Collabora and Allotropia) - many fundamental issues are not
| close enough to their customers' needs - which is why it was
| decided to hire Jonathan directly to give RTL-CTL-CJK support a
| boost. Individual user donations are what enables this work.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-10-13 22:00 UTC)