From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sat Jun 23 2007 - 00:00:35 CDT
On 6/22/2007 9:20 PM, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:
> OK...now that we're getting closer to list topic...
> [...]
>
>> Even if these ancients did have a separate set of symbols for base
>> 60, say, we have no need of them.
>
> On this I could not disagree with you more, particularly if there is a
> scholarly community studying these texts.
>
If there is an existing set of symbols in use by some community, that
would be worthy of investigation for encoding. George makes that point
that the (modern) community does not use such symbols to discuss the
concepts in the old texts. Where symbols exist in the old texts
themselves, they are worthy of investigation for encoding in their own
right - and I suspect for the scripts in question, that is being done /
has been done as part of the task of encoding these ancient scripts.
>> I have an article somewhere that discusses computations and
>> computational algorithms used by the ancients, even translating the
>> source text into English, with illustrations of the computations
>> involved. The author of this article found no need to use symbols
>> other than 0–9 to talk about the computations.
>
> Sure. But (again assuming that these symbols exist as hypothesized)
> that is at best a transliteration. Your argument -- if I understand
> it correctly -- is similar to saying that because we can represent
> Bengali unambiguously in Roman transliteration, we don't need to
> encode Bengali script in Unicode.
No, his argument is, that for purposes of discussing these concepts, the
modern community uses modern symbols and therefore there is no need to
hypothesize. Looking at what "might" be is not useful - it is much more
practical to research what is, and then one can start to worry about
whether and how this translates into new character codes.
A./
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