From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Thu Nov 13 2003 - 11:32:18 EST
Ken Whistler posted:
> *Ciphers* are orthographies designed (ideally) to map one-to-one
> against graphemes of a writing system and (ideally) are designed
> to obscure those graphemes by using non-obvious forms to hide
> content from casual observers.
I don't think whether a system was "designed to obscure the graphemes"
is important (at least in respect to whether Unicode should encode a
script or not). Some discussing this seemed to think it was.
For example Morse code, semaphore flags, braille, and bar codes are
often implemented in fonts as one-to-one transliterations of the
corresponding Latin characters. But these systems were not at all
designed to obscure the graphemes to which they point, but to reveal
their semantics clearly in situations where normal representations of
the original graphemes were not as usable.
Perhaps rather than "cipher" one should say that Unicode does not encode
separately scripts or systems intended solely as transliterations of
other scripts. Ciphers are a common example of such scripts and systems.
Jim Allan
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