From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Jun 02 2010 - 19:02:00 CDT
> I'm not sure how much longer we should continue to wait for Tengwar and
> Cirth.
Three words: Squeaky wheel -- grease.
Don't expect this to "just happen". The corporate members of
the Unicode Consortium are mostly concerned about economically
significant sets of characters that impact their business
(or their software processes) -- hence the major push to
deal with the emoji set for mobile phones during the last
couple of years.
The academically oriented (and funded) work represented
particularly by the Script Encoding Initiative is focussed
on minority scripts in current use and historic scripts.
You can see their priorities here:
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/
Tengwar and Cirth are on their list, as well, but aren't
given a high priority for encoding.
The national bodies associated with WG2 understandably are
focussed on scripts and other sets of characters of national
interest to them -- hence China's work on Tangut, Jurchen,
Old Yi, Old Hanzi, and so on.
And the last I checked, the Elvish Nation wasn't represented
in ISO.
So what it would take for Tengwar and Cirth, is not to
"continue to wait", but rather for those concerned with
their encoding -- and y'all know who you are -- to dig
out the proposals, update them, strengthen the documentation
and the argumentation to deal with potential text model problems
or other objections (including national body representatives
who might have preconceived notions that such scripts
are not somehow "worthy" of encoding), and then put them back in
the hoppers and plan on pushing them on the agenda of the committees
for a couple of years.
That's what it takes.
--Ken
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