From: Curtis Clark (jcclark-lists@earthlink.net)
Date: Sat May 14 2005 - 12:13:23 CDT
On 2005-05-14 09:27, Michael Everson wrote:
>> which is not just phonetic alphabet like such of Latin is. Every
>> letter in Glagolitsa has its name and image, depengind on its
>> position, and a message written in this script can have a hidden message.
>
> Script mysticism is out of the scope of the Universal Character Set.
Two scripts with which I have some knowledge of the mystical aspects are
Runic and Ogham. In both cases, mystical aspects were not explicitly
included, meaning that they were neither deprecated nor enshrined, but
rather ignored, except to the extent that they paralleled need for
encoding historical use. In the case of Runic, there are glyph variants
that can supposedly change the mystical meaning of the text (although
this may be a modern invention); they were not encoded. In the case of
Ogham, the blank ogham was encoded (U+00A0), but not with that meaning. :-)
Putting on my mystic hat (it has fur, antlers, and bones, and is
extremely uncomfortable :-), I would argue that encoding variants that
serve sacred or mystical uses dishonors those uses by standardizing them
and tying them to the needs of nonbelievers.
> Or, as the
> wonderful invention human beings have made to record language by means
> of little marks on paper, all scripts are sacred.
Huzzah!
-- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Web Coordinator, Cal Poly Pomona +1 909 979 6371 Professor, Biological Sciences +1 909 869 4062
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