From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Thu May 27 2004 - 14:28:44 CDT
> From: John Hudson [mailto:tiro@tiro.com]
> Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 11:59 AM
> The concern I have is not so much with the Phoenician encoding per se,
but with the
> encoding of 'significant nodes' -- to use Michael's phrase -- on a
script continuum...
> In particular, if Unicode encodes a number
> of 'significant nodes' on the semtitic script continuum, how should
the standard be
> used
> to encode texts that fall between the nodes? This is an issue even if
one accepts the
> concept of nodes, i.e. of a linear continuum with clearly identifiable
chronological or
> cultural script instances. Dean has, convincingly I think, presented
examples of
> overlapping of use of such 'nodes' among ancient communities, making
it harder to
> distinguish them from within the continuum.
To make discussion easier, let me speak in terms of an analogy,
referring to the nodes as integers and the points in between as real
numbers. If someone could show documents written within a single
community in a reasonably concurrent time frame (i.e. they're
communicating with one another) that mixed several rational values from
the entire range between 0 and 1, then I'd say the nodes 0 and 1 were
nothing more than an artifact of our classification. But if one can only
point to cases of (say) documents from a given community containing 0
and .6, or 0 and .9, then it would seem that the nodes had some
conceptual validity within that community. IIRC, we have been given
indication of the latter, but I'm not sure we've been given indication
of the former.
Peter
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division
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