From: Keutgen, Walter (walter.keutgen@be.unisys.com)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2006 - 06:17:02 CST
Elaine,
now I do no longer understand your goal. I.e. what can
Unicode bring you for your work? I nevertheless answer
to your below questions.
You write:
>I read through the Unicode glossary very quickly. It
>is not oriented towards Semitic scripts.
In the first e-mail of the series that I saw, you
referred to Marc Küster saying that in Germany all
technical documents have a glossary and you believed
that it helps unifying the technical language. I
already answered that it is rather to help the
readers of a series of related documents to know
exactly what the words describe. I.e. a way of
disambiguing. Glossaries attached to documents are
always turned toward the document. A glossary for the
Unicode standard is hence necessarily turned toward
the processing of text in computers. The terms have no
other meaning than in other standards with the same aim,
the wording might be other. Unicode adds 2 things: the
unification of all scripts of the world in one standard
and the two step mechanism for encoding in abstract
integer numbers first, then by actual computer
encodings (bit/byte sequences), in the plural because
Unicode has several encodings. Of course the definitions
are suited to that universal text computing goal and
let us be honest, tainted by the lingua franca English
and its Latin script. How would we communicate otherwise
in this forum? If you want to use a glossary somewhere
else, you unavoidably run into problems i.e. you have to
adapt it.
You might find more general definitions in encyclopedias
and adapt them for your purpose. Begin perhaps by the 25
I have sent you as most important for you in the belief
that you are interested in Unicode.
>Those 2 terms, 'character' and 'glyph' are actually
>two core terms that I need to define for Semitists.
Please read in the Unicode standard, Chapter 2
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch02.pdf,
'2.2 Characters, not glyphs' and in
http://www.unicode.org/standard/principles.html
'Interpreting Characters and Rendering Glyphs'.
Best regards
Walter
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