From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 16:59:40 EST
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
> At 17:36 +0300 2003-11-10, Alexander Savenkov wrote:
> >"The Wrong Thing To Do" can be seen everywhere in the newspapers when
> >the names and some other words originally written in Cyrillic and
> >other scripts are letter-by-letter (mapped?) transliterated to the
> >resulting script.
>
> That's transliteration, which is different.
What other solution will you find for standardizing the Tifinagh script,
when it clearly appears that glyphs are not relevant for the character
identity?
(1) May be a system similar to ISCII where characters are coded by their
function rather than their glyph? This is what has been suggested in the
Tifinagh encoding proposal. It has the caveat that several sets of glyphs
are needed to represent the same codepoints according to cultural
conventions, and the additional problem that no convention actually has
glyphs that cover the whole abstract character set. The code coverage
however is complete with character names, to which an unambiguous
accentuated Latin letter is immediately accessible. This is in that model
that Latin letters would be used as possible glyphs for the script.
(2) Or a codepoint assignment for each representative glyph? The problem
would be to name the code points unambiguously (and thus: which cultural
convention will this name adopt?) This model corresponds more or less to the
solution used when creating fonts, as a collection of symbols, independantly
of their actual meaning. The problem is that it becomes difficult to
interchange texts encoded with each script variant. But if this correspond
to the script usage for a particular language, and no language uses distinct
variants simultaneously, this could be a good solution. However the
character properties will be difficult to define (do they all encode letters
or syllables?)...
(3) Or a code point assignment for each (name,glyph) pair ? This solution
would create multiple code points with the same representative glyph but
distinct names, and multiple code points with the same basic name or
function but distinct glyphs. For this case, the chosen Unicode name should
be qualified by the name of its cultural convention (which one? the name of
the author who published that convention?)
(4) Or a set of separate scripts? This would create separate blocks for each
Tifinagh variant, deunified but with a clear assignment between the glyph
and its meaning, but would require more codepoints. Here it becomes possible
to identify the language and script and work on its semantics, with precise
character properties. This model would correspond to the solution adopted
when mapping the scripts previously unified in ISCII into Unicode with
separate code points in separate blocks. Here also the name to use for each
script block is not clear...
Fondamentally, the solutions (3) and (4) are nearly equivalent, but solution
(3) is more compact and mixes the same number of code points into a unique
block, which would have less "holes".
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