What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase?

You can find them all with this UnicodeSet query (though the query alone naturally won’t show you the lower and upper forms):

  [[:Changes_When_Lowercased:]&[:Changes_When_Uppercased:]]

It’s a handy way of finding all kinds of things along these lines. Look at the properties of some characters you care about, and see how you can add, subtract and intersect them.

TIL:

Polytonic orthography (from Ancient Greek πολύς (polýs) 'much, many' and τόνος (tónos) 'accent') is the standard system for Ancient Greek and Medieval Greek and includes:

- acute accent (´)

- circumflex accent (ˆ)

- grave accent (`); these 3 accents indicate different kinds of pitch accent

- rough breathing (῾) indicates the presence of the /h/ sound before a letter

- smooth breathing (᾿) indicates the absence of /h/.

Since in Modern Greek the pitch accent has been replaced by a dynamic accent (stress), and /h/ was lost, most polytonic diacritics have no phonetic significance, and merely reveal the underlying Ancient Greek etymology.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_diacritics)

The other day I posted similar tables/scripts for related character properties and there was some good discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014045

- Unicode codepoints that expand or contract when case is changed in UTF-8: https://gist.github.com/rendello/d37552507a389656e248f3255a6...

- Unicode roundtrip-unsafe characters: https://gist.github.com/rendello/4d8266b7c52bf0e98eab2073b38...

For example, if we do uppercase→lower→upper, some characters don't survive the roundtrip:

Ω ω Ω

İ i̇ İ

K k K

Å å Å

ẞ ß SS

ϴ θ Θ

I'm using the scripts to build out a little automated-testing generator library, something like "Tricky Unicode/UTF-8 case-change characters". Any other weird case quirks anyone can think of to put in the generators?

The Unicode names of these 31 chars,

  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON

  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER {_} WITH SMALL LETTER {_}
    L,J
    N,J
    D,Z

  GREEK CAPITAL LETTER {ALPHA,ETA,OMEGA} WITH PROSGEGRAMMENI

  GREEK CAPITAL LETTER {ALPHA,ETA,OMEGA} WITH {PSILI,DASIA} AND {_}
    PROSGEGRAMMENI
    VARIA AND PROSGEGRAMMENI
    OXIA AND PROSGEGRAMMENI
    PERISPOMENI AND PROSGEGRAMMENI

What's the difference with letter Ch [0]? When it's capitalized at the beginning of the word, it also looks like uppercase C and lowercase h.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_(digraph)

> The family emojis seemed cool in someone's head, but then someone tried to make a family with mixed-ethnic parents and the children are locked to one skin color; the only solution presented was to add 7,000 more emojis to Unicode.

Funnily enough, that "someone" is the entire Emoji subcommittee under the Unicode consortium, and pretty much everyone in the consortium represents some vendor company. The solution was proposed mainly because they can be technically composed via far less than 7,000 glyphs and several vendors did implement that as an experiment; ultimately the industry didn't bother, so it was scrapped.

I liked the smiley/simpsons colored emoji. They didn't need different skin tones.

The Unicode consortium keeps adding garbage like emojis to keep their job...

It has the advantage that while ſome programming languages feature “class” as a reſerved word, “claſs” almoſt never is, ſo you can uſe that inſtead of a mis-ſpelling.

Yes my uſe of this caſe is correct.

W is fairly recent in the official French alphabet and its officially called "double v".

In Belgium it can be pronounced or heard as "way" (wé) usually for - BMW as "bay-hem-way" (bé-m-wé) - www as "way-way-way" (wé-wé-wé) - WC as "way-say" (wé-c) .

It is a double u in English. Naming it differently would be wrong.

I think it's a double v in German. Since French doesn't really use it, they could import any of the names. Portuguese is on the same boat. It imported the double u name, but still has plenty of words where it's a double v... you can't make it all correct.

> Is there are proper French spelling for that pronunciation? Like how h is aitch in English.

No, French doesn't have spelling for the name of letters.

(I'm a native French speaker.)

Does Polish treat them as distinct letters in their own right for sorting purposes? That is usually when you see digraphs appear in (at least some) national encodings, from whence they end up in Unicode for compatibility reasons.

Per the article:

> These digraphs owe their existence in Unicode ... to Serbo-Croatian. Serbo-Croatian is written in both Latin script (Croatian) and Cyrillic script (Serbian), and these digraphs permit one-to-one transliteration between them.

> Katakana is used less than hiragana

Katakana was used much more frequent than hiragana for about a century following the Meiji restoration, regardless of the technical limitation. That can be thought as another parallel though: Latin majuscule letters are (close to) the original Latin script while minuscule letters are derived from them, but now minuscule letters are much more frequently used. The only difference here is that either hiragana or katakana wasn't derived from each other, they share the single origin of simplified Chinese characters.

I've also seen a use where katakana is used to represent a "robotic" speech, like something a robot would say monotonely.

As a test for your browser's internationalisation support, try

    data:text/html,<div lang="nl" style="text-transform:capitalize">ijmuiden

Yes, I'm Hungarian, and I'm not even mad (pun intended) about "mad" matching "madzag". I find that we ourselves sometimes conflate characters and letters, so many people's first thought would be that "madzag" is six letters. I think most other digraphs e.g. "sz" or "gy" are considered more tightly bound, so one would be unlikely to say that "szám" (=number) is four letters rather than three.

> Access denied [...] The owner of this website (learnhungarianfromhome.com) does not allow hotlinking to that resource

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_alphabet

From the article:

> These digraphs owe their existence in Unicode not to Hungarian but to Serbo-Croatian. Serbo-Croatian is written in both Latin script (Croatian) and Cyrillic script (Serbian), and these digraphs permit one-to-one transliteration between them.¹

title case for digraphs

This changes the original text, though, which might not always be suitable.

This is just your monoculture speaking. Transliterations between alphabets are actually mentioned in the article, did you read it? Nobody added anything to their alphabet, alphabets are invented and then grow and shrink organically.

In practice, all languages that use digraphs and trigraphs don't use distinct Unicode codepoints for them, generally speaking (and Unicode specifically marks those codepoints as legacy, so this is an officially blessed practice). The reason why they exist is because one of the explicit goals of Unicode as originally designed was to be able to roundtrip many existing national encodings lossless. So digraphs that were already in the national encodings for whatever reason ended up in Unicode as legacy, while those that were not, did not.

While I do have some reservations about Unicode I think its important to note that nobody forces you to deal with all of it. I think programmers should embrace the idea of picking subsets of Unicode that they know how to handle correctly, instead of trying (and failing) to handle everything. DIN 91379 is one good example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_91379

Incidentally I believe that this is kinda also the approach HN takes, there is at least some Unicode filtering going on here.

I agree in some cases, but note that lots of the ugly and weird things in Unicode are there for backwards compatibility with older encodings.

The purpose of Unicode is to encode written text. There's an inherent level of complexity that comes with that, like the fact that not all languages obey the same rules as English. If you don't want to deal with text from other systems, don't accept anything except ASCII/the basic Latin block and be upfront about it.