Re: Mixed up priorities

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Wed Oct 27 1999 - 06:28:20 EDT


Ar 18:51 -0700 1999-10-26, scríobh G. Adam Stanislav:

>It would not be pragmatic to place a CH on the typewriter keyboard when
>there is not even enough room for all characters using diacritics: It is
>easier to type a C followed by an H than to type a diacritic dead key
>followed by a character (mostly because the diacritics use shifted keys, so
>you need more effort to precompose an "accented" character than a ch).

It's easier to code and to parse and to normalize too.

>This discussion, by the way, is getting way out of hand. The way I see it,
>it does not matter what any government says, what typewriter keyboards do,
>what pre-existing standards there exist. Linguistically, ch is a character
>is Slovak. It seems logical to me that it should have its encoding in
>Unicode. It also should have had its encoding in the Central European 8859.

And the !Xóõ should have their dt'kx' too, right?

>As for the distinction between letters and characters, well, in Slovak
>there is no such distinction. We have the same word for both. The only
>difference I can see is that letter is from Latin, character from Greek.

Russian anyway has "bukva" and "znak".

>At any rate, this is not an earth shaking matter to me. All I said was I
>found it funny that we are worrying about Klingon while we do not have all
>of human languages covered.

Slovak is certainly covered. And we are working on the others.

>Personally, all I can say is to repeat that linguistically ch is a separate
>character in Slovak.

It is a unique entity in Slovak. That does not it a character make.

>It does not matter to me whether Unicode chooses to
>respect linguistics of some languages but not of others.

That is not correct. Your needs can easily be met by using the UCS and
14651 together.

--
Michael Everson * Everson Gunn Teoranta * http://www.indigo.ie/egt
15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland
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27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn;  Baile an Bhóthair;  Co. Átha Cliath; Éire



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