L2/04-066

From: Patrick Durusau
Date: 2004-02-02 03:44:12 -0800
Subject: Proposal N2698

Rick,

If you could pass this along to the appropriate parties on the UTC
meeting on February 3, 2004?

Thanks!

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

***********************************************************

Greetings,

I am writing on behalf of the Society of Biblical Literature in support
of the proposal (N2698) to add cuneiform to the Unicode standard.

By way of background, the Society of Biblical Literature is the oldest
learned society in North America, being established in 1884. It numbers
some 6,000 professional scholars from around the world as its members
and it mission is to "foster biblical scholarship." One aspect of
biblical scholarship is the study of biblical literature in its Ancient
Near Eastern context, which includes texts written in cuneiform.

In terms of personal background, I am a member of the TEI Character Set
Working Group and have been involved in encoding (both character set adn
markup) issues for Ancient Near Eastern texts for the past 15 years. I
am also involved in a variety of standards efforts and currently serve
as the chair of V1, the US TAG to SC34.

This proposal to add cuneiform to Unicode, is the result of years of
effort by a wide variety of experts on cuneiform. It will allow scholars
who study, teach or publish cuneiform texts to avoid conflicts between
variant encodings and avoid converting from one encoding system to
another for data interchange.

Unfortunately, some controversy has arisen about this proposal. Steve
Tinney, who I know personally, and the other scholars involved in this
effort represent a long line of scholars who have devoted their working
careers to the study of cuneiform. I have personally benefited from
their efforts, such as the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, of which
Steve Tinney is the editor.

The objections to this proposal do not represent any segment of the
scholarly community who will directly benefit from seeing this proposal
go forward in the UTC.

I have personally reviewed the proposal and urge the UTC to accept it
for further review and inclusion in the Unicode Standard.

Sincerely,

Patrick Durusau


--
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model