From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Thu Nov 13 2003 - 12:53:40 EST
On 13/11/2003 08:32, Jim Allan wrote:
> ...
>
> 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
>
Perhaps the point is more that these codes, as well as ciphers like
Theban, are alternative representations of the same abstract characters,
in the same sense as UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are, or for that matter a
bit pattern in a cable might be. As such they are distinct from
different scripts, made up of different characters with different
semantics. That is not a watertight definition, I know, but it seems to
me more promising than focusing on secret intent or the size of the
community of users.
As for the cases not covered by this definition, I am reminded of an
example of mixing scripts within one word, which I noticed several times
in Azerbaijan, where both Latin and Cyrillic scripts are in use and
there has been some confusion during the changeover from Cyrillic to
Latin. The word, seen as a sign on a building, looked like:
JEMƏKXANA
All the letters in that word are valid letters in the Latin script. But
the intended word, pronounced something like IPA [jemækxana] (meaning
"cafe"), should be either
YEMƏKXANA (Latin) or
ЈЕМӘКХАНА (Cyrillic)
Note that in the form JEMƏKXANA the first letter is written as Cyrillic
but the penultimate one as Latin, whereas the intermediate letters are
(almost) the same in both scripts.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Nov 13 2003 - 13:52:10 EST