On Thursday, October 21, 1999 6:24:43 PM, Robert Brady wrote:
> You are reducing the plausability of your argument below, which is totally
> unrelated. There are about 4 interesting fictional alphabets to encode :
> Shavian, Tengwar, Cirth, and Klingon. These add up to less than 500
> codepoints. There is really no possibility of UTF-16 being filled, let
> alone UCS-4! (Of these proposals : Shavian, Cirth, and Klingon are stable
> and uncontroversial technically, but still have not gotten into the
> standard!)
>
Shavian is in a different category from Tengwar, Cirth, and Klingon, in that
it is an artificial writing system designed for use with an existing
language and isn't tied to any fictional universe. It is more akin to the
Deseret Alphabet and other attempts to create new, more easily learned
alphabets for English.
Klingon is stable and technically uncontroversial, but it is a political hot
topic (unlike Tengwar and Cirth, strangely). Moreover, most of the existing
user community for Klingon writes in Latin transcription, so there isn't
much genuine need for encoding it at this time.
Shavian and Deseret have both been accepted by Unicode for future encoding
in the standard, and the latter has been approved by WG2 as well and will be
among the initial inhabitants of Plane 1.
=====
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
tseng@blueneptune.com
http://www.blueneptune.com/~tseng
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