Re: E0000 Language Tags for Some Obscure Languages

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sun Feb 27 2005 - 12:48:18 CST

  • Next message: Christopher Fynn: "Re: E0000 Language Tags for Some Obscure Languages"

    On 27/02/2005 17:04, UList@dfa-mail.com wrote:

    >...
    >Phoenician: use Hebrew transliteration text plus a smart font to swap in
    >Phoenician glyphs when the E0000 "Phoenician" language tags are encountered.
    >
    >
    >
    Doug, I am infamous on this list for having suggested several different
    alternatives for representing Phoenician in Unicode. See the list
    archives, especially for May 2004 - and please don't try to reopen those
    discussions! But this is one suggestion which I did not consider. Why
    not? Simply because it has nothing at all to commend it.

    I'm not sure if you are suggesting a language tag at the start of a
    string of Phoenician text or before each Phoenician letter.

    If the former, this simpy doesn't work with current font technologies,
    which are not stateful in the way necessary to support this.

    If the latter, I suppose in principle current font technologies could
    support this if the language tag and the letter were treated as a
    multi-character ligature. But it would surely be ruled out by its
    extreme inefficiency, and because the rather similar alternative of
    using a variation selector after each Phoenician letter is much more
    efficient but was ruled out for various reasons, including its lesser
    inefficiency, which apply all the more to your solution.

    If what you really mean is that you want to use higher level markup to
    distinguish Phoenician from other languages by a change of font perhaps
    indicated by a different markup style, with language tags as one
    specific way of doing this markup: Well, that might work, but the UTC
    and WG2 have already rejected the argument that Phoenician should be
    distinguised only by a font changed signalled by markup. 

    -- 
Peter Kirk
peter@qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
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