On Wed 26 Nov 1997 10:37, Siobhan Harper-Jones wrote:
* Besides, unlike Gothic, isn't Coptic still used as a contemporary liturgical
* language, as well as an everyday language in some circles? That would mean
* that Unicode, according to its charter, would treat it differently, as a
* living script, than it would treat Gothic, which is strictly paleographic,
* and Old Church Slavonic, which (I understand) is a historical liturgical
* language. So maybe the ongoing comparison of the Coptic situation with
* Gothic and Old Church Slavonic is somewhat misleading.
*
* As a living language, it would merit its own script, I would think,
* regardless of its historical origins. After all, if you wanted to represent
* all the Indic-derived Southeast Asian scripts in the Devanagari range, you
* could justify that under the same reasoning as Coptic/Greek unification. But
* Unicode has distinct code points for Tibetan, Burmese, Lao, Thai, etc., even
* though they're all basically elaborate variations on Sanskrit ka, kha, ga,
* gha, nga, and so forth.
Unfortunately, Coptic has not been a living language since the last century.
Except for a handful of aficionados who are making an active effort to revive
the language , Coptic is used exclusively in scholarly circles and in the liturgy
of the Coptic Church.
Kamal Mansour
Monotype Typography
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