> From: David Starner [mailto:dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org]
> > The second example I would like to raise are the "Square
> Words" or "New
> > English Calligraphy"[6] (I don't know which name is more
> appropriate,
> > but I will refer to it hereafter as "NEC"), which is a
> Sinoform script.
> > NEC is a system where each letter of the English
> alphabet[7] is equated
> > with one (?) component of Han characters, and each
> orthographic word is
> > written within the confines of a square block, in imitation
> of Chinese
> > writing [... CJK ideographs are precomposed in Unicode ...]
> > Thus, there's no reason to expect that NEC would be encoded any
> > differently.
>
> I disagree. Say, for instance, some small* country decided to
> adopt NEC
> as a writing style, and hence Unicode had to include it. There are
> 1,000,000 words in English by some counts, so it's not feasible to
> encode them all in Unicode, or even some semi-complete subset. So
> it would be encoded by component and treated like any other complex
> script. (* I say a small country, because a large country might be
> able to get a large chunk of precomposed characters stored in Unicode.
> I still don't think that it would be done soley precomposed.)
>
This, however, is absurd - one of those 1,000,000 words is
"antidisestablishmentarianism", and there's a whole bunch half that long or
longer. Show me the glyphs for them! This NEC thingy may make cute artsy
stuff, but it would be useless for communication. Besides, does anyone
really believe that alphabetic writers would decide that they'd rather learn
thousands of glyphs? We're getting deeply fictional here...
/|/|ike
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