"John H. Jenkins" wrote:
>
> At 8:07 PM +0200 7/3/01, Genenz wrote:
> >Should one consider the Chinese oracle bone
> >inscriptions (1200 BC) for entry to the unicode list?
> >They really did exist.
> >
>
> As a rule, historical scripts (in which I'll include OBI, even though
> their descendant is with us today), are encoded when the following
> criteria are met:
>
> 1) They are sufficiently well understood that a definitive catalog
> of signs can be made, for at least part of the collection, and
>
> 2) Representatives of the scholarly community are involved in the
> encoding process.
>
> The problem with OBI is that, as I understand it, the only signs
> which are sufficiently well understood that they would meet criterion
> (1) are already in Unicode in the form of their modern forms. I
> could be wrong and am starting to research the matter myself.
John,
There is another class of signs in OBI (and other inscriptions) which
would be candidates for encoding, and those are the ones which are
composed entirely of recognized components, but which configuration of
components doesn't happen to relate to any existing modern form.
So, for example, say we have an OBI character composed of 2 components A
and B. Both of these components are known (in "everyone's" opinion) to
relate regularly to modern characters, but either the particular
combination of A with B doesn't relate to any modern character yet in
Unicode, or else the combination occurs, but with different relative placement.
Let's see if I can find an example ... OK, here's one off the top of my
head: look at [U+668A]. If you compare this form with the OBI characters
on p. 26 of my LTBA Monograph, you'll see that although both the
[U+65e5] and [U+9801] components are both in [U+668A], the arrangement
of these components is different in the known OBI variants of the
diviner name. In many of the OBI forms, the sun/star is over the
kneeling person's head, rather than to the left.
So, the questions here are, can we reliably relate the OBI variant forms
to one another? and can we relate any of the OBI variants to the modern
form in [U+668A] ?
It is sometimes the case, though admittedly a rather rare one, that 2
characters, e.g. in Seal forms, have the exact same components, but
different relative positioning of the components, and that this
difference is *disinctive*. That is, the two characters have different
meanings and distinct usages. I don't know if anyone has argued for
distinctiveness in the case I mention ... but they could choose to write
the character with relative component placement as in OBI ...
creating another one of these virtual kaishu forms based on a modern
interpetation of forms in older inscriptions ...
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