MichKa responded:
> While fully recognizing the importance of Middle Earth to some people it is
> difficult for me to get past the fact that there Middle Earth has no
> national representative to WG2? :-)
But this is, of course, nearly irrelevant. If you prowl through the
unencoded scripts listed in the Roadmap documents now, there is almost
nothing left where we would expect a national representative to show
up at WG2 -- or are you expecting Babylonians, Hittites, and Nabataeans
to show up any time soon?
Even for the minority scripts, we no longer have national representatives --
instead we have the big national governments showing up speaking
for minorities on their territories (if they care). Sometimes those
minorities are ethnic minorities in the classic sense, and other times
they are scholarly "minorities" who happen to claim a certain jurisdiction
in the area by virtue of academic expertise. Hence Germany is claiming
expertise on a number of historic scripts of the Middle East, not because
of any territorial association, but simply because the German scholars
care about the subject matter.
I see no defensible line here, if American, British, and Irish scholars
claim expertise in something like Tengwar and wish to see it encoded.
> And of course anything that is
> difficult for me will likely be difficult for others.
Of course. ;-)
>
> And the same people who push so hard for these scripts may never know why it
> is so hard to find experts for other scripts who are willing to help.
> Perhaps those experts just did not want their scripts to be given equal
> footing with those of the _Elvish Linguistic Fellowship_ or similar
> organizations?
I think this is an utter nonissue. As Rick pointed out, the reason why
Cham is not progressing has to do with funding for minority language
support and standardization work in Vietnam, not because some key
Cham scholar is miffed about Elvish. The reasons for funding problems
in Vietnam are economic and political, and don't have any demonstrable
connection to arguments on the Unicode list about the decoration of
Star Trek sets at Paramount.
>
> It certainly gives me pause.
...that refreshes.
> Obviously this will not be enough to away any of those who are truly
> committed to representing the interests of the elves, or the people who want
> to write like elves, or whoever it is they are in fact representing.
>
> You can just call me a consciencious objector to having anyone who
> subscribes to "Vinyar Tengwar" considering themselves to be among the
> Númenoreans (a.k.a. the Dúnedain), who alone of all the races of Men knew
> Elvish tongues. :-)
Aha! I see you are more of a true believer than the true believers.
So your problem is that the *wrong* group is claiming jurisdiction
here, and you would prefer to wait for the Númenoreans to show up
in person at WG2 before progressing any Tengwar proposal.
--Ken
>
> michka
> (who loved Tolkien yet nevertheless decided to leave middle earth)
>
>
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