From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 12:35:43 CDT
Rich Gillam of Language Analysis Systems, Inc. Unicode list reader wrote
at 11:41 AM on Thursday, May 13, 2004:
>This whole discussion of interleaved sorting has veered off into the
>ditch. Now maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention (quite
>possible, as I pretty much lost patience with the whole Phoenician
>thread a LONG time ago)
Probably, I would hazard a guess, because you are not a user of these
diascripts.
...
>That's how we got here. The effect it has on sorted lists of words
>seems pretty uninteresting to me. I can think of two use cases:
>
>1. A sorted list of Phoenician words (or words using the Phoenicial
>script range, in whatever language or script) that mixes encoding
>conventions-- some words use the Phoenician script range and some use
>the existing Hebrew range. Same letters, same glyphs, different
>underlying encoding. You want to hide the difference in underlying
>encoding from the end user.
>
>2. A sorted list of Hebrew words, some in modern Hebrew script and some
>in Paleo-Hebrew (or some other script that uses the Phoenician range).
>Same language, different glyphs.
>
>Both are justification for an interleaved sort order, but really, how
>often will either use case come up?
Well, for just one case, if you're a Dead Sea scroll scholar (one of the
more populated sub-disciplines in Semitic scholarship) all the time and
every day.
>Do you really expect-- in EITHER
>case-- to have long lists of words that need to be mechanically sorted?
Yes.
>Do you expect it to happen often enough that hacking together a Perl
>script to do it once isn't going to get the job done?
Yes.
>Why is this a
>burning issue that has to be enshrined in the default UCA sort order?
[Or even a separate encoding for that matter?] Because of what lies
behind the responses to your questions above.
Respectfully,
Dean A. Snyder
Assistant Research Scholar
Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project
Computer Science Department
Whiting School of Engineering
218C New Engineering Building
3400 North Charles Street
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218
office: 410 516-6850
cell: 717 817-4897
www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
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