From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Tue May 04 2004 - 08:44:25 CDT
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
On
> Behalf Of Francois Yergeau
> Suppose I were to float a proposal to encode Old Latin, consisting of
the
> original 23-letter unicameral alphabet. Try this on for size:
>
> > It is false to suggest that
> > fully-[accented, cased Vietnamese] text can be rendered in
> > [Old Latin] script and that this is perfectly
> > acceptable to any [Vietnamese] reader (as would be the
> > case for ordinary font change).
>
> Would you agree to encode Old Latin on those grounds?
I think there is a difference between this hypothetical example and the
PH case: the Old Latin doesn't have the accents, but if you used the 23
uni-cameral characters for Vietnamese text, then surely a Vietnamese
speaker would recognize it as caseless Vietnamese with the accents
stripped off. And it's easy to see how the accents could be added to Old
Latin to make it even closer: lower-cased Vietnamese text.
But if you took Biblical Hebrew text and set it with PH glyphs w/o
accents, there are a lot of people that know Biblical Hebrew who would
not recognize this sample as Biblical Hebrew. And there is no obvious
way to add the accents, but even if there were, I suspect those same
people still wouldn't recognize it as accented Hebrew with archaic
glyphs.
So, while Michael's argument was flawed in the way he expressed it, I
think your counter-argument also is flawed.
Peter Constable
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