L2/00-153

Title: Further comments from Carl-Martin Bunz

Source: Rick McGowan

Status: For UTC Information

Date: 2000 April 26

At the 16th Unicode conference in Amsterdam, Carl-Martin Bunz, a linguist from the University of Saarland (Germany)
presented the latest in a series of his papers dealing with historical scripts and encoding methodologies.
I recommend that UTC members read his paper L2 00-128 and consider incorporating such ideas
into future work on the "roadmap" for Unicode & 10646.

Rick

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From: Carl-Martin Bunz <cm.bunz@rz.uni-sb.de>

Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2000 21:06:43 +0200

Organization: Universitaet des Saarlandes

Let me state the following, which you may have circulated together with
my paper - as sort of addition or "memorandum":

1. As I stated in my previous mail, no assigment of a given script to a
specific category of mine is to be regarded as fixed and definite.
Rather, we should continue to debate about the classification of the
scripts, internally within scientific expert groups, as well as in
exchange with ISO and Unicode.

2. As for category B2 and C, i.e. subcategories C1 and C2, the verdict
"not encodable" applies to a methodically strict preparation of the
scripts in question for a normative abstract character encoding. This
does not mean, however, that we cannot achieve a compromise in applying
a "selective abstraction of characters" as accounted for e.g. in the
flow charts slides 7, 8, 10 and 12. In the case of e.g. the Egyptian
Hieroglyphs and the Major Cuneiform Script we may find such an
intermediary solution for Unicode/ISO 10646, while waiting for a
scientifically exact encoding which could be envisaged say in ten years
at the earliest.

3. The fact that examples from East Asia and America are missing in my
paper does not mean that I disregard historic scripts from these areas
in any respect. My examples are simply taken from areas where I have a
certain amount of knowledge which I acquired by my own scientific
activities as an Indo-Europeanist.

Best regards,

Carl-Martin.

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Carl-Martin Bunz, M.A.
Institute of Comparative Indo-European
Linguistics and Indo-Iranian Studies
Dept. 7.1
University of Saarland
P.O. Box 15 11 50
D-66041 Saarbruecken
Germany

Tel. +49-(0)681-302-2744 /-2304
Fax +49-(0)681-302-4234

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