ꆈꌠꁱꂷ Text Messages
Note: If you see the title of this post as anything other than “
Text Messages”, it means you don’t have proper Yi syllables font support. Click here to remedy that.
I posted last week on Tibetan keyboard support on the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system. I’m a big fan of progress with personal computing when it comes to script support, so Tibetan keyboards are a good sign, even if I have no reason to type Tibetan. Hell, I still can’t easily type IPA on my iPod, though I did find a way to cheat. And I get really frustrated when something as simple and common as Arabic gets mis-rendered as late as 2011. We should have figured out how to make this consistently work by now.
The other day I was messing around with a Samsung Galaxy and an iPhone, seeing what would carry over in text messages¹. My first phone in China was one I brought from Jordan, so it supported Arabic and English but not Chinese². iPhones, presumably, support everything. Here’s the evidence:
Yi syllables are supported for file and folder names, and probably in text messages for that matter. I didn’t have a second iPhone to play with so I couldn’t be sure, but I’d bet it’s all the same. This is a folder I created and called “Sinoglot” using our official Yi name. In case you missed it, that’s ꍏꇩꉙ [tʂo˧˧ kɔ˨˩ hɔ˨˩], and can be seen in the logo rotation.
Now I’m by no means a Mac fanboy, but I gotta say, Apple’s done a good job when it comes to Unicode support. They’ve done fairly well for a while now, but this takes the cake.
I didn’t have a chance to test Yi out on an Android device. So if anyone has a Galaxy Tab or the like sitting around, I’ve used a little Yi script in the title of this post, and below³ is a bit more to test things out. I’d love to see a screenshot.
ꐋꀨ，ꆏꇿꀀꌠꉬ？ꉢꑝꅇꀀꌠꉬ。ꆏꆈꌠꅀꉌꈲꉬ？ꉢꆈꌠꂷꉬ。ꆍꃅꄷꋬꂻꈨꅪꀞ！ꋬꂻꈨꅪ，ꐥꅍꐥꀋꇲ。ꆍꃅꄷꎿꈎꋚꁧꒉꁧꂄꈓꉫꀕ？ꂄꐯꂄꈓꉬ。ꀊꅰꃅꀋꂄꈓ，ꈾꌋꆀꀦꇴꆹꉾ，ꍯ、ꑸꑽꆹꀋꉾ。ꑞꒉꄸ？ꂷꉐꐛꇨꄉꂿꃋꈻꇨꀕꒉꄸ。ꆍꃅꄷꐩꏿꀕ？ꐩꑌꏿ，ꎭꑌꏿ。ꌿꏿꀕ？ꌿꀉꑌꃅꀋꏿ，ꈾꄈꀉꑌꃅꏿ。ꈿꐔꅀꈵꆈ？ꈿꐔꑌꏿ，ꈵꆈꑌꏿ。ꋚꁧꋋꈨꈍꃅꐙ？ꂄꈓꉬ。ꆍꋚꋠꇎꀕ？ꋠꇎꐯꋠꇎ。
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1. Oddly, the Android phone didn’t show “你” of all things. I’m sure it’s a fluke.
2. And I hope whoever stole it had a great time figuring out how to get the operating system out of Arabic. Jerk.
3. Taken from BabelStone’s Yi pages.
My Samsung Captivate (one of the US versions of the Galaxy) can’t display any of the Yi characters; they’re all just boxes.
Sam,
Thanks for telling me. Sorry tho.
What version of android are you running?
1. Yi has the coolest looking glyphs of any writing system I know.
2. Apple’s pretty good on i18n, but not perfect. Their South Asian script support often leaves something to be desired, or so I’ve been told.
3. Microsoft for their part have a lot of engineers who want to do the right thing (Google “Sorting It All Out blog”), but too often the Sale and Marketing Guys make terrible decisions which leads to bad font distribution, difficulty in switching system languages, hard to install IMEs, etc. Still, if you want an OS that supports more of the world’s languages than any other, you need Windows.
4. I have a Google CR-48 Chrome netbook, and the CJK font included stabs you in the eye. The open source people are absolute shite at making good CJK fonts with good antialiasing.
Kellen,
The Captivate runs Android 2.1 (AT&T hasn’t rolled out a froyo or gingerbread update yet).
1. Agreed
2. Agreed
3. If that’s the blog I think it is, it’s a pretty cool one.
4. Agreed. Open source fonts have good coverage for obscure glyphs but are shit to look at. Kinda how I feel about windows language support in general as well.
@Carl: I’ve been a Mac user for a long time and find Windows to be pretty frustrating when it comes to i18n. Could you give some examples of situations where it’s better than other offerings?
BTW: I have the Yi fonts installed and they show up just fine in Firefox but not in Chrome. And I’m too lazy to figure out how to change Chrome encoding… Anyone else see browser issues?
Microsoft localize into more languages, especially in South Asia. They have more ways of supporting local sorting and date options.
I’m running on Android 2.2 on HTC Desire, and the only characters that render properly on WebKit 3.1 browser are the punctuation marks 。,?! and spaces.
A non-space character render as a box. Commas render as having a space on both sides, and periods have two spaces after them.
Sorry, no screenshots since my phone isn’t rooted…
Kai,
Thanks. The commas in the paragraph are in the CJK Unicode block. As are all the other punctuation marks. That’s why the commas are centred in the square. Whatever font is on your android has them draw that way. So basically it means it’s a font issue that Yi doesn’t show up.
Else,
I retried the 你 thing. Still didn’t work. Shows up as a question mark. Weirdness.