The Stink A

January 31, 2023 8:00 AM

Once you notice them, you'll start seeing them everywhere. The Side Eye zooms in a tiny but telling detail: the glitchy macron.
posted by Etrigan (58 comments total)

I'm thinking you don't want to plunder your diacritics from one font and your characters from another. That might look even worse!

You could set up a ligature to turn a macron into aa and similar. Not sure if better than glitching.
posted by NotAYakk at 8:12 AM on January 31, 2023

This is very interesting. And not at all what I expected.
posted by chavenet at 8:16 AM on January 31, 2023 [7 favorites]

Previously on Metafilter: The umlaut is a pain in the ass to type, in which people find it too difficult to write the word Türkiye.

There is absolutely no excuse for any modern computer system to not be able to support ā ē ī ō ū. Particularly on a website that might be handling Māori words or English loan words from Māori. As the comic says, a particular problem here is designers using broken web fonts that have stripped necessary glyphs to save space. I can absolutely hear the Kiwi accent in the panel of the guy saying "you really optimised the shit out of that".
posted by Nelson at 8:36 AM on January 31, 2023 [19 favorites]

As the comic says, a particular problem here is designers using broken web fonts that have stripped necessary glyphs to save space.

Which is so ironic as to be obscene, considering that front-end devs casually use MASSIVE javascript frameworks that gobble up 100MB+ without breaking a sweat and will drop image files dozens to hundreds of megabytes in size just to squish it to a tiny size or crop-window-view a tiny fraction of it.
posted by tclark at 8:46 AM on January 31, 2023 [19 favorites]

tclark: "Which is so ironic as to be obscene, considering that front-end devs casually use MASSIVE javascript frameworks that gobble up 100MB+ without breaking a sweat and will drop image files dozens to hundreds of megabytes in size just to squish it to a tiny size or crop-window-view a tiny fraction of it."

Yeah, but that's probably for advertising/tracking, which is important.

Some systems of romanizing Japanese also depend on the macron, and I've seen a lot of glitchy macrons as a result of that.

Pro tip for Mac/iOS users: if you want to type an accented letter, just hold down that key on your keyboard and a bubble with all the accented variants will pop up. I've discovered some longtime Mac users don't know this (comparatively new) trick. Doesn't work for everything—I can type ÿ this way, but not đ.
posted by adamrice at 9:08 AM on January 31, 2023 [12 favorites]

You could set up a ligature to turn a macron into aa and similar.

Irish did this to indicate lenition. The "old script" used a dot over the letter. When written on a typewriter, the letter is followed by an h.

This happened in the transition from hand-written to mostly typewritten Irish. I'm not sure the same would be accepted or desirable today though.
posted by bonehead at 9:09 AM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Love this, thank you for sharing the comic, it's a great example of how this sort of visual/graphic journalism format can be so much more effective than text-only.

When I lived in Hawai‘i, I was fairly diligent about the okina ‘ and making sure I didn't use an apostrophe instead, keyboard shortcut is option key + ] key. But I rarely typed ā for Mānoa and usually just copy-pasted it from whatever article I last read that used it.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:14 AM on January 31, 2023 [7 favorites]

adamrice, I don't know why I never used that despite having been told that trick! I guess I didn't realize I could just hit the 8 key after getting the pop-up bubble for ā. I thought I would have to mouse over and click it?
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:17 AM on January 31, 2023

This was *really* good, and I learned a ton. Thank you!
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 9:30 AM on January 31, 2023

Pro tip for Mac/iOS users: if you want to type an accented letter, just hold down that key on your keyboard and a bubble with all the accented variants will pop up. I've discovered some longtime Mac users don't know this (comparatively new) trick. Doesn't work for everything—I can type ÿ this way, but not đ.

for android, gboard is similar--hold down the letter and you'll be presented with the most common diacritical variants. for windows 10+, powertoys now includes quick accent, which lets you hold down the letter key and quickly use the arrow keys to determine which variant you want to enter.
posted by i used to be someone else at 9:44 AM on January 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

This reminds me of how lötß øf dìåçrítics åre a sñap to type on mac, but nōt thēsē fōr whātēvēr rēāsōn.

Basically, if it's common in Western European languages (French, Spanish, German, Swedish, etc.) then you can type it with ease. If it's Turkic, Māori, etc, you're out of luck. I'd wonder why that is but it's pretty obvious why that is, so I'll just despair instead.

(On non-preview, I now see the tip for how to do this more easily on Mac, so thank you!)
posted by Navelgazer at 9:50 AM on January 31, 2023

Īf yōū sēt yōūr Māc's kēybōārd tō Māōrī īt's stīll dēād sīmplē, though.

...those aren't nearly as much fun as mëtäl ümläüts though.
posted by Kyol at 9:56 AM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you try typing á into Metafilter tags, it gets deleted. Looks from that Türkiye thread like there's a way but you have to know the special code.
posted by aniola at 10:04 AM on January 31, 2023

This reminds me of the extra hoops I had to jump through to properly support UTF-8 char encoding in an app I wrote a while back. It seems that some apps (er, excel) love to default to Cp1252 when on windows for, er, reasons.

For those who love Java, the following is the eventual hack I used. I read the entire file in to see if the UTF-8 decoder pukes as a crude way to figure out if the input file is UTF-8 or not.

    CharsetDecoder uft8Decoder = StandardCharsets.UTF_8.newDecoder().onMalformedInput(CodingErrorAction.REPORT).onUnmappableCharacter(CodingErrorAction.REPORT);
    String charset = "UTF-8"; 
    try {
        String result = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(model.getFileName()),uft8Decoder)).lines().collect(Collectors.joining("\n"));
    }  catch (Exception ex)  {
        logger("Not UTF-8: " + ex.getMessage());
        charset = "Cp1252"; // Windows standard txt file stuff
    }

    try  {
        ResultSet rs = new Csv().read(model.getFileName(),null,charset);
        ResultSetMetaData meta = rs.getMetaData();
        // Do stuff
    }

There are similar hacks on the output side. Eventually I just made it so that all text outputs from the app includes BOM (0xEF 0xBB 0xBF) so that excel does not trash the formatting when the user double clicks on the CSV file.

I also had to put in checks so that UI components such as a search box would correctly find Renée if you just typed in Renee.

And don't get me started on systems that only support USASCII-7.
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 10:16 AM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is a related talk about the intersection of typography, racism and politics by Agyei Archer, that is also fantastic.
posted by mhoye at 10:17 AM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ligatures that turn aa into ā won't work for Māori because it is possible for one syllable to end with a and the next to start with a: the word "ataahua" for example would be incorrect as "atāhua" because it is a-ta-a-hua. The current orthography would need to change in some way.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:30 AM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

Interesting. In Hawaiian, there would need to be an okina (which I am lazy and use an apostrophe for, which is still better than most road signs, which just omit it entirely) between the double letters if it's a new syllable.
posted by DebetEsse at 10:58 AM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Interesting read; also see the ʻokina for the correct spelling of Hawaiʻi, which I have gotten wrong by lazily using the apostrophe.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:32 AM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Love love love Toby Morris.

It's the story about Tyrone's daughter's name that really underlines the point here.
posted by rednikki at 11:41 AM on January 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

I always used to put the accent in as the next letter then kern it back over the top.* Then I had to find/change all instances of that character and accent. I was typesetting a journal called Angelaki at one point, before they sold out to Big Journal, and I got so tired of having to do that for Slavoj Žižek I hacked my own copy of the font we were using.

Older fonts only have the ASCII set of characters, which includes some accents but not all. So if you wanted to set (say) a set of manuals for FedEx cross-Europe you had to buy loads of copies of the font, one for each version of Latin you needed (I worked on such a project in about 1996 in a strange little office in Old Street. Old Street used to be full of strange little offices. These days it's just hipsters, which I suppose is an improvement, but I notice the hipsters don't pay me). Now, of course, you can put anything in there (even Klingon, I think. If I had the energy I'd petition them to include a Kobaïan code-page), but I suspect a lot of places are still using fonts left over from the 90s, which won't have macron or háček or ogonek or anything further out than Germany.

*To clarify - the font would often have the accents, but not the accented characters. And a macron is basically an en-dash baseline-shifted. What? It's better than sticking it in in Helvetica and hoping no one notices.
posted by Grangousier at 11:44 AM on January 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

Ugh gods I had to edit an academic book that had a boatload of special characters because its subject was literature in multiple languages. The commercial publisher outsourced all its typesetting to India and got exactly what they paid for when all the macroned vowels showed up in a different font. I was like no, that can't work, and cue a thousand-email chain of me trying real hard to be patient about explaining to a bunch of corporate marketing/design people that the font they'd chosen for all their publications didn't support macroned vowels, and they needed to use a different font for this book because it would look even shittier for their brand if the book came out with all those vowels in Arial. Good times.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 12:21 PM on January 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

→ It's the story about Tyrone's daughter's name that really underlines the point here.

The Canadian government only allows the Roman alphabet to be used on official documents, too. This is unforgiveable.

(heck, when I arrived here, they only allowed 21 upper case A-Z letters spread across three names in the Social Insurance Number registration. My middle name lost a letter because it was too long.)
posted by scruss at 1:21 PM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

OK, that Mac trick was new to me, and neat. Bu it doesn't show ǎ ě ǐ ǒ ǔ which are needed for writing Mandarin. (To say nothing of ǖ ǘ ǜ ǚ.)
posted by zompist at 1:28 PM on January 31, 2023

when I arrived here, they only allowed 21 upper case A-Z letters spread across three names in the Social Insurance Number registration

That's just shows a complete lack of imagination. Even if everybody had absolutely boring Anglo names:

• Christopher Alexander Richardson (30 letters + 2 spaces)
• Christopher A Richardson (22 letters + 2 spaces)

posted by The Tensor at 1:48 PM on January 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

very good, now try to capitalize i (in turkish, there's a capital İ with a dot) or lower case I (once again, in turkish, there's a lower case ı without the dot).
posted by esoteric cruelties at 1:55 PM on January 31, 2023

These macrons (which are different from these) are also used by Japanese typing long vowels in Romanji, for example shōgun or Tōkyo.
posted by Rash at 2:09 PM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

My favourite method is still the X-windows "Compose" system which while quirky is pretty easy to learn. You don't hit the keys all together, you start with the "Compose" key and then hit some other symbols vaguely reminiscent of what you're trying to type and it has a big table to look the combinations up:

Compose ' a ⇒ á
Compose _ a ⇒ ā
Compose U a ⇒ ă
Compose a e ⇒ æ
Compose _ . a ⇒ ǡ
Compose U ! a ⇒ ặ
Compose ( a ) ⇒ ⓐ
Compose = > ⇒ ⇒

You can also customize these mappings to suit yourself. I haven't tried it on non-Unix OSes but wincompose looks pretty neat.
posted by nickzoic at 2:23 PM on January 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

On the Mac, at least, if you need to access other characters, load the keyboard for the language that uses those characters. For example, I just loaded the Turkish keyboard and can type Į, ł and ę. As long as the font supports those languages, the characters will be available to the long-key-press.
posted by Grangousier at 2:23 PM on January 31, 2023

And if you do load those other keyboards, if you click on the flag that appears in the menu bar you can select the language, then Show Keyboard Viewer, and a virtual keyboard appears that allows you to enter the characters that way. For example, here are some random Kazakh letters: Фсегфдднб ерунэку тще кфтвщь фе фдд.
posted by Grangousier at 2:29 PM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

funny because China, one of the biggest web markets in the world, utilizes these in pinyin to indicate the first tone, something that you have to implement because keyboards are, well, not really made for Chinese characters so pinyin + autospell is used as an intermediary for typing online

you would think that people might want to include this to encompass a sixth of the world's population but nah. at least hopefully this reveals how much of our modern day tech is built on such outdated, shitty, horribly optimized protocols that are like barely updated by unpaid volunteers who release new rules that nobody pays attention to and leads to shit breaking all the time

everyday I wake up and see that email still works is a miracle to me
posted by paimapi at 2:40 PM on January 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

keyboards are, well, not really made for Chinese characters

Or maybe vice-versa.
posted by The Tensor at 2:50 PM on January 31, 2023

Unicode has a general mechanism to stack diacritics ("combining characters above"). A bit of post-processing of the normalized characters ("NFC") in the source text into decomposed combining characters ("NFD") should yield something that can be displayed correctly on all modern browsers with any font. After all, no font has this character:

ā̄̄̄̄̄̄̄̄̄

But the Unicode rendering ā̄̄lgorithm can produce it anywā̄̄y from the base font.

Which is to say that a small amount of effort on the server side should make it possible to render any of these characters correctly (without font substitution!) for any font on any reasonably modern browser. You just have to care enough to put in the effort or more about getting your indigenous population's language right than your designer's precious font preference.
posted by sjswitzer at 3:42 PM on January 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

Lol, I just learned that Safari on iOS doesn’t render that right (should have had several macrons). But it rendered it good enough to solve the problem.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:02 PM on January 31, 2023

Different methods of Chinese text input have been attempted, but there's always going to be a problem entering many characters with few keys. We had the same problem entering English on cellphones with ten keys. There was one method for entering Chinese that used a conventional English keyboard, but assigned every character an arbitrary 2-key code. So text entry was really fast, but the memorization burden was enormous.

There was also the Ming Kwai typewriter, which I find completely fascinating. Entering one character took three keystrokes but was somewhat more mnemonic.
posted by adamrice at 5:05 PM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

That gave me a really demented idea. Thanks! Here's the Unicode character for "horse" in Chinese with a macron on top: 馬̄

I'm going to have to see how that comes out on my phone (works fine on Chrome), but putting a macron on top of an arbitrary character in an arbitrary font isn't rocket science.

But yeah, input methods for ideographic languages is a very interesting and deep topic. Most modern operating systems have IMEs (Input Method Editors). I have to admit I'm glad I never had to deal with them in my career as a software engineer. Not that it isn't fascinating, but I think you'd just have to really specialize in that to even begin to be competent.

Edit: It did indeed work on my phone.
posted by sjswitzer at 5:23 PM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Correction: Rendering Unicode is kinda rocket science, but the browser does it for you so it doesn't have to be your problem.
posted by sjswitzer at 5:45 PM on January 31, 2023

I can absolutely hear the Kiwi accent in the panel of the guy saying "you really optimised the shit out of that".

This is Kris Sowersby and he's a national treasure with a great Kiwi accent. Slightly off-topic, but here's him going deep on fonts at Webstock. It's a fascinating and wonderfully presented deep-dive on the topic.
posted by maupuia at 6:43 PM on January 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

Previously on Metafilter: The umlaut is a pain in the ass to type, in which people find it too difficult to write the word Türkiye

The online news outlet which I read most often (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, one of the national publicly funded broadcasters of Australia) just started using the spelling Türkiye and Türkish for the first time this year (2023.)

I was wondering if there was significance to the sudden change.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:35 PM on January 31, 2023

Ok, Grangousier, what the heck did you do there? Some kind of unicode Caesar cypher? How does "Actually, they are not random at all" turn into that?
posted by aneel at 8:43 PM on January 31, 2023

Using Icelandic font once cost me a brand-new kindle.

This was when Amazon didn't post Kindles to Australia, so I had to use a mail forwarding service from the US to Australia.

When creating an account, they suggested you use unusual characters for increased password security.

So I chose a song title by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós plus two added numbers - "Hoppípolla97", "Sæglópur97" or something similar.

Trying to log in using a password with Icelandic font crashed the portal, and also crashed the password retrieval/change password mechanism.

Customer service were not able to fix it.

My Kindle ended up being destroyed instead of forwarded :(

(and I genuinely believe they destroyed it instead of pocketing it, they sent me a lot of scolding emails to log into the portal ASAP while I was trying to resolve the issue.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:49 PM on January 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

The ð character is called an Eth (or ðæt in Old English.)

It is used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), Khmer and Elfdalian.

Nowadays the main place you are likely to see it regularly is Iceland, as in Jólabókaflóð (Book Flood, the practice of vast numbers of books being published and bought in November and December each year as Christmas presents).
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:58 PM on January 31, 2023

"Nominally a book that covers the rough century between the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s and that of computing in the 1950s, The Chinese Typewriter is secretly a history of translation and empire, written language and modernity, misguided struggle and brutal intellectual defeat"

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n05/jamie-fisher/the-left-handed-kid

Substitute "Using non-European language" for "The Chinese Typewriter" and the sentence is still true.

Mind you - I have sympathy for the dev who insisted all variable names could only use the ASCII set
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 9:47 PM on January 31, 2023

sjswitzer, it appears to be Safari on iOS on Metafilter that won’t display your multiple-macron’d “a.” Not only that, but it substitutes fonts, exactly as TFA complains about. Imgur gets it right.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 10:47 PM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ok, Grangousier, what the heck did you do there?

If you go to System Preferences / Settings, and then go to Keyboard (I've not actually used the latest version of Mac OS yet, so I don't know how different Settings is, but I'll assume not), then go to Input Sources and then click on the plus sign at the bottom of the box on the left you can load all sorts of keyboards. I loaded Kazakh (a cyrillic language I have literally know knowing of). There should (now) be a flag in your menu bar. If you click on it, you can select any language you've loaded in System Preferences. I switched to Kazakh and typed a sentence in English that made that string of characters (so not quite random). Under the same flag menu there's Show Keyboard Viewer which brings up a virtual keyboard that allows you to find the character you need. You can also click on the virtual keyboard to enter the character.

I also suggested (but assumed, so didn't exhaustively test, which is naughty of me) that once the language is loaded that language's alternate characters are available under the long-key-press as mentioned above.
posted by Grangousier at 1:35 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Scratch that last one - I just loaded Kurdish, but don't get ğ with a long-key-press on the g so I was obviously getting overexcited. The rest of it works, though.
posted by Grangousier at 1:40 AM on February 1, 2023

My favourite method is still the X-windows "Compose" system

I use this one, and I sometimes look at the built-in Compose sequence file (/usr/share/X11/locale/$LOCALE/Compose) when I can't remember an exotic accent. It works for all sorts of useful symbols beyond accents too:
Compose + 1 + 2 gives ½
Compose + > + = gives ≥
Compose + ^ + 8 gives ⁸

They also have some really silly sequences too, like:

Compose + p + o + o gives 💩.
Compose + F + U gives 🖕
Compose + L + L + A + P gives 🖖
They seem to have removed Compose + C + C + C + P giving ☭ at some point,but now you can get that symbol with Compose + ? + \, as a sort of graphical decomposition of the two components.
posted by jackbishop at 8:51 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

This post inspired me to make sure my Linux computers each have a definable Compose key.

Now I can type things like "much respect to the Māori people" without having to copy-paste. So good!
posted by pianoblack at 11:09 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I also use a compose key on Windows, using WinCompose, which works out really convenient for me.
posted by ambrosen at 12:04 PM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

WinCompose looks nice, thanks for recommending it. I tried the powertoys quick accent but the space bar binding doesn't work for me. It's too easy to activate by accident if you don't let go of the last key before pressing space.

The macos method of long press to bring up a chooser is really great. Who needs key repeat anyway? A couple of years ago I tried about six programs to do that on Windows and none of them worked reliably
posted by Nelson at 12:48 PM on February 1, 2023

BEGIN RANT

On modern Linux there are a couple of ways to do fancy keys. They are incompatible with each other. The modern way is 'iBus' based IME (Input Method Editor) which is the sort of thing that changes your whole input into a different language. For instance, I often used to use 'scim-anthy' for Japanese. This is the sort of thing where you type 'kami' and get a pop-up menu to change from hiragana to katakana to various kanji and it's pretty smart about giving you the most used things first. There is also a 'rfc1345' method that gets you something like Vim digraphs, there is 'latex' that lets you use '\epsilon', there are input methods for many many many languages. This iBus input method has a built-in 'compose' functionality, but it's totally fucking fuck shit compared to the XCompose that people are raving about.

You have to pick one or the other. You can use the XCompose for input or you can use the iBus for input. Can't really use both.

I got pissed off enough to look at iBus's 'compose' once upon a time. It sucks. First iBus is mostly Python (eww), but mostly the compose functionality is built into the core of iBus and it is undocumented and very limited.

It uses an SQLite database that only supports having 3 or 4 characters in the 'compose' part, and it's doesn't even try to read your '~/.XCompose' file of custom definitions (nor does it try to read the system standard XCompose definitions).

I thought about it for a quick minute... would have to fork 'iBus' to fix the fucking fuck shit compose that iBus supports and NOPE'd out of even trying.

SOMEBODY should write a plugin for iBus that supports the ~/.XCompose file. I miss that ease. But sadly it's like this, the XCompose does some character substitutions, but doesn't support the complexity of multiple alternative representations like the iBus methods.

Such a PITA.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:09 PM on February 1, 2023

fantabulous timewaster, thanks for that investigation! I've confirmed that font substitution does indeed occur in Safari on both iOS and Mac. Everything works fine on Chrome. This suggests that Safari NFC-normalizes before rendering. But what's really really strange here is that it apparently choses an alternate font where the macron is very misplaced (shifted to the right a noticeable amount). It's extremely unlikely that there'd be a font with this gross defect. So the bug (and it's surely a bug) seems to be that after (possibly incorrectly) normalizing the Unicode and realizing the base font does not contain that glyph, it picks an adjacent font which hopefully does contain that glyph but turns out it doesn't either and then goes ahead and decomposes the character and puts a macron over the alternate font's glyph.

But here's the really fun part: It does that based on the font metrics of the original font, thus resulting in an incorrectly placed macron!

I'm not going to do a deep dive into the standards to see how Unicode rendering is supposed to work in HTML. That would be at least a week's worth of work and would likely result in, "The standards don't quite settle this."

In conclusion, despite lots of progress, browser compatibility remains problematic.

(Psychic debugging is my stupid pet trick.)
posted by sjswitzer at 3:06 PM on February 1, 2023

WinCompose is great! It led me down a deep rabbit hole on the question of "how should I type the ʻokina?" That let me to a frequently-referenced GitHub repo for XCompose definitions that'a a sort of de facto standard. I've filed an issue there about adding the Hawaiian letter.
posted by Nelson at 9:31 AM on February 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

My favourite method is still the X-windows "Compose" system which while quirky is pretty easy to learn.

That’s how the older macOS system worked, too - you’d use Option-key combos to stack: for example, Option-e changes the cursor to a highlighted acute accent and then the next character you enter like e or i would be be combined into the accented form.

They added the press and hold system a few releases back (Big Sur?) because it’s easier to remember but they still document both: see the second section on the help page describing “dead keys”. There are a ton of colleges which maintain instructions for entering accents and various symbols, too.
posted by adamsc at 9:58 AM on February 2, 2023

And if you find it super annoying in macOS and just want to go back to composing instead of holding:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

You probably have to reboot to get everything to get the new setting, but it's permanent (and toggle-able back and forth) otherwise.
posted by Kyol at 11:25 AM on February 2, 2023

A very cool comic and a ridiculous situation that modern technology is still so plain-anglo based.
posted by dg at 9:41 PM on February 2, 2023

Grangousier: wildly, if you paste that into a search engine, it figures out the original. I guess typing on the wrong keyboard is a common error that they know how to correct?
posted by aneel at 4:19 PM on February 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's a bunch of keypresses, so perhaps the computer is trying to render those keypresses in a way that is least dissonant - the one interpretation of the keypresses that resembles actual language. TBH, that would be the most human I've ever perceived computers to be. Usually it's us who are desperately trying to make things make sense.
posted by Grangousier at 4:53 PM on February 3, 2023

Or maybe vice-versa.

Chinese characters came about first by a few thousand years as did the English language so no, not vice-versa, that is a wholly dumb whataboutism. keyboards were created to adapt to the existing English language and Western-imposed (specifically the US) imperialism during the Cold War essentially made English the lingua franca due to its control over trade and military resources - the personal computer being popularized during this time resulted in the keyboards we use today which still enforce a kind of cultural supremacy

wholly dumb and unnecessary
posted by paimapi at 9:40 AM on February 4, 2023