At 03:50 +0100 2001-07-06, David Starner wrote:
>A lot of the arguments against Klingon weren't specificially against
>Klingon; they were more against any fictional scripts in Unicode.
But arguments don't hold water. Criteria for encoding scripts or
symbols are that (1) they are used by enough people who need to
transfer data, (2) they are important enough historically with regard
to the representation of the recorded data of humankind. Now some of
(2) have a handful of documents and hardly any users. Some of (1) are
"fictional" (whatever that means -- all writing systems are
artifacts) but have a great many users.
Klingon failed not because it was Klingon, but because speakers of
that language themselves don't really use it except ornamentally, as
gifs in web pages and so on. Translations of Hamlet are published in
the Latin script. Grammars and dictionaries use the Latin script.
>The editorial response to comments from national groups, in the public archive
>of ISO 10646 stuff that you linked to at the start of this message, included
>a complaint about Deseret from the German Standards body, in that it was
>inappropriate for being a fictional script. The response to that was
>bascially "Not really", IIRC. That does not bode well for lack of contention
>for later scripts.
The folks at DIN were wrong about Deseret, in my opinion. It seems to
me that they did not know what Deseret was. Whether it had a long
life is irrelevant. That script is of cultural importance to a rather
sizeable community of people, and, is of interest to students of
writing systems, English phonology, and the history of Mormonism.
-- Michael Everson
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 13:48:07 EDT