Re: Berber/Tifinagh (was: Swahili & Banthu)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 20:04:27 EST

  • Next message: Patrick Andries: "Re: Berber/Tifinagh (was: Swahili & Banthu)"

    From: "Kenneth Whistler" <kenw@sybase.com>
    > Rather than encode a half dozen different
    > "scripts" for this, one for each local orthographic tradition, the
    > entire script was carefully "unified" to enable representation of
    > any of the local varieties accurately with the overall script
    > encoding. I suspect that a similar approach will be required to
    > finish the encoding of Tifinagh.

    At least! That's what I wanted to hear: that the script will be
    encoded on a glyphic approach, with no intented association
    with the actual phoneme they represent.

    The ordering of these glyphs and their naming will possibly
    be consistent with one culture, but not with another.

    And each culture will use only a subset of the encoded glyphs...

    And so UCA default collation will work reasonnably well for
    one culture and not the others that will require tailoring.

    Now, how will we define foldings, and text boundaries for
    the other cultures? I don't know...

    How will we perform intercultural semantic analysys for
    texts that share the same words and radicals? Difficult
    to answer... It will even be hard to define any
    transliteration scheme between them (it would require
    identification of the cultural convention, and not only
    of the language, and texts written for one culture will
    look as completely undecipherable in another one).

    Such problems do not exist with the same level between
    Serbian Latin and Serbian Cyrillic, as there's no ambiguity
    in the transliteration to use...



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