From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 19:46:28 EST
From: "Patrick Andries" <Patrick.Andries@xcential.com>
> > In this condition, why couldn't Latin glyphs be among
> > these, when they already have the merit of covering the whole abstract
> > character set covered by all scripts in the Tifinagh family?
>
> Because it is best to use Tifinagh glyphs as representative glyphs of the
> Tifinagh script?
No: the simple reason is the choice of the "representative" glyph, which
will
probably be accurate for one cultural convention but completely wrong with
another, as that glyph represent another phoneme coded at a different
place where another "representative" glyph is used, which may also be
wrong.
Look at the phonemic meaning of the glyph that looks like two triangles,
pointing top and bottom to each other. Look at the glyph which looks like a
moon crescent (open on right side) with a dot in the middle... Which
phonemic value do they have? This depends on cultural conventions, and it
really looks as if there was not _one_ but several distinct Tifinagh scripts
using the same glyphs but with incompatible phonemic values...
> But I agree that chosing the representative glyphs
> may become a sensitive issue if the Tifinagh script is to be unified, each
> school might feel offended that its preferred glyphs were not chosen in
> ISO/IEC 10646. This does not necessarily mean that Tifinagh should be
> encoded with an easy Latin mapping in mind.
I'm just suggesting that if the phonemic encoding model is used, the choice
of "representative" glyphs will create confusion, as it will privilegiate
one interpretation of the glyphs and not the other one. Polemics are already
present on the Internet because of the choice of interpretation that has
been made by Morocco, which excludes other interpretations.
So you won't avoid that users will need a way to better know which phoneme
is represented by the codepoint. One can of course look at the assigned
character names, but it will be less polemic if the Tifinagh script is
standardized with several charts showing the relevant glyphs for each
represented culture (some squares in the charts will be blank, or just
showing the hexadecimal codepoint which is not used in each culture, and
Berber readers will still need to see there where they also write a Latin
glyph, when they want to communicate with the common Latin transliteration.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Nov 10 2003 - 20:22:58 EST