From: David J. Perry (hospes@scholarsfonts.net)
Date: Mon Apr 18 2005 - 03:54:58 CST
> Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the
> history of the world
As a classicist, I can say that this is quite an exageration. Most of
the Oxyrhynchus papyri are fragmentary; even finding a relatively
complete play by Sophocles would not change his position as one of the
great dramatists of history. Finding a work by a previously unknown
author would be very interesting, but again, hardly requiring a rewrite
of world history..
The likelihood of finding new characters in these papyri that would
require encoding in Unicode is quite small (not zero, of course, nor am
I suggesting in any way that new characters should not be encoded if
appropriate).
What scholars need, right now, is the ability to use what's already in
Unicode. We have to use combining marks, since there will be no
precomposed combinations added to the Standard. We have to use glyph
variants, since not every shape of every letter will be encoded.
Unicode is 15 years old now and we are still have very limited access to
these features.
David Perry
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