Adams says:
> Anyway, didn't others try this before? Didn't they all fail royally?
>
Yes. Unicode has, in fact, already approved two phonetic alphabets for the
writing of English as candidates for encoding on Plane 1: the Deseret
Alphabet and Shavian. The Deseret Alphabet is among the initial scripts
slated for inclusion of part 2 of ISO/IEC 10646.
But both were distinct non-successes. One of the reasons for the DA's
failure, at least, is its non-similarity to the Latin alphabet. Instead of
learning a modified version of known pronunciations for the letters, people
had to learn a set of pronunciations for an entirely new set of letters.
And there were mechanical problems in getting typefaces produced and books
printed.
I don't think that there would be any objection per se to encoding the
Camion Code in Unicode if (a) a solid proposal as to how to do it were
available (with preferably an actual implementation behind it) and (b) one
could show that there are already people using it or who had used it at one
point. Formal encoding in Unicode as a means of encouraging its use would
be inappropriate IMHO.
=====
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
tseng@blueneptune.com
http://www.blueneptune.com/~tseng
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