From: <rick@unicode.org>
> What's "bad" is that work seems to get done on fictional scripts while
there
> are still millions of real people (some of whom even have access to
> computers) who can't express texts of their natively-used languages with
> Unicode because we don't have their scripts encoded.
This is (I think) one large reason for the contention -- a combination of
the reaction of people who argue against fictional scripts due to what they
fear will be the appearance of the above, and of course the people who
actually do not like the appearance. Can we truly blame them?
> The most common reason for not having enough information is that
> we can't shlep enough experts to us, nor shlep enough of us to the
experts,
> to complete any encoding proposals... a matter of time and funds.
It is even quite likely that work on fictional scripts can even serve to
undermine attempts to get alternate funding to assist with the difficulties
you cite here.
Example: I do not think I would find fault in the character of an
organization or individual that would choose not to assist in the work to
encode Egyptian Hieroglyphics if they saw their script in the same
"consideration list" as something like Klingon.
The only valid justification I have seen for encoding scripts like Desert is
the one from John Jenkins:
"The problem was, a vicious circle quickly arose. Nobody
started to implement surrogates because there were no
characters encoded using them, and nobody wanted their
characters to be encoded using surrogates because nobody
was implementing them.
To break the vicious circle, we needed a writing system
which was at once real and at the same time so incredibly
rare and/or dead that nobody would object to its being
encoded with surrogates. I volunteered the Deseret Alphabet
as such as script, and it was quickly accepted."
Well, now with the strength of tens of thousands of new characters that
*are* important to a large number of people, this argument cannot really be
applied to fictional scripts as effectively. No one needs Tengwar or Cirth
(or Shavian!) to make people believe that surrogates need to be supported,
if indeed they ever truly did.
MichKa
Michael Kaplan
Trigeminal Software, Inc.
http://www.trigeminal.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 13:48:07 EDT