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On 04-12-2010 19:16, wrote:
> One possibly (and easily ) could based on the Unicode code points
>
check the ranges for each language, but I think it would be very useful
> for people parsing text from different languages.

It is not there.

But I am not sure that it is missing.

The concept will be fundamentally broken if one language
has more than one alphabet (I don't know if such case exist,
but it could).

And the benefits are very limited given the practice
of writing names as they are in their native language
even though the letters are not used in the language
of the text.

Arne

wrote:
> One possibly (and easily ) could based on the Unicode code points
>
> check the ranges for each language, but I think it would be very useful
>> for people parsing text from different languages.

Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> It is not there.
>
> But I am not sure that it is missing.
>
> The concept will be fundamentally broken if one language
> has more than one alphabet (I don't know if such case exist,
> but it could).

Japanese has more than one alphabet.

It's also broken if more than one language shares the same alphabet, or parts
thereof, as many European languages do.

> And the benefits are very limited given the practice
> of writing names as they are in their native language
> even though the letters are not used in the language
> of the text.

Also there are changes within a language, often deployed with considerable
élan, such as an added soupçon of borrowed terminology, or abandonment of
symbols from its noösphere, both manœuvres that English has undergone.

--
Lew

On 04-12-2010 21:36, Lew wrote:
> wrote:
>> One possibly (and easily ) could based on the Unicode code points
>>
>> check the ranges for each language, but I think it would be very useful
>>> for people parsing text from different languages.
>
> Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> It is not there.
>>
>> But I am not sure that it is missing.
>>
>> The concept will be fundamentally broken if one language
>> has more than one alphabet (I don't know if such case exist,
>> but it could).
>
> Japanese has more than one alphabet.

That breaks the idea.

> It's also broken if more than one language shares the same alphabet, or
> parts thereof, as many European languages do.

The function would work in this case - it would just return
true for more than one language for a lot of codepoints.

>> And the benefits are very limited given the practice
>> of writing names as they are in their native language
>> even though the letters are not used in the language
>> of the text.
>
> Also there are changes within a language, often deployed with
> considerable élan, such as an added soupçon of borrowed terminology, or
> abandonment of symbols from its noösphere, both manœuvres that English
> has undergone.

Yup.

Arne