> Marc Küster wrote:
>I agree that "common usage" for Gothic is Latin transliteration,
but wonder,
>if that is rather not due to a lack of fonts of sufficient quality
and suitable
>typesetting mechanisms. Here we should take in the expert opinion
of Gothicists.
>I, at least, would not feel qualified to decide this question. If
experts are satisfied
>with a Greek / Gothic unification and believe it represents their
practice properly, so be it.
Besides, unlike Gothic, isn't Coptic still used as a contemporary liturgical
language, as well as an everyday language in some circles? That would mean
that Unicode, according to its charter, would treat it differently, as a
living script, than it would treat Gothic, which is strictly paleographic,
and Old Church Slavonic, which (I understand) is a historical liturgical
language. So maybe the ongoing comparison of the Coptic situation with
Gothic and Old Church Slavonic is somewhat misleading.
As a living language, it would merit its own script, I would think,
regardless of its historical origins. After all, if you wanted to represent
all the Indic-derived Southeast Asian scripts in the Devanagari range, you
could justify that under the same reasoning as Coptic/Greek unification. But
Unicode has distinct code points for Tibetan, Burmese, Lao, Thai, etc., even
though they're all basically elaborate variations on Sanskrit ka, kha, ga,
gha, nga, and so forth.
--Siobhan Harper-Jones
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:38 EDT