On Tue, Nov 14, 2000 at 08:22:21AM -0800, D.V. Henkel-Wallace wrote:
> Sadly, it seems unlikely that any furture change or adoption of orthography
> will use characters not already supported by the then major computer
> systems. In fact the trend seems to be the other way, viz Spain's changing
> of its collation rules.
>
> For a minority language (which all remaining unwritten languages are) the
> pressure will be strong to use existing combinations (since they won't
> constitute a large enough community for people to write special rendering
> support).
I don't know about that. On one hand, you have Chimchim(sp?) whose current
alphabet uses g and x as special vowels, and Cherokee which is usually (often?)
written in an ASCII-compatible orthography using ? as a letter. But on the
other, Esperanto and Lakota both have introduced new letters without problem,
and Lakota still can't be written in Unicode*. And I don't see why adding
new letters would be a problem - when the Cherokee syllabary is used, it
appears to be used with one of two different 7-bit font-based encodings,
not Unicode. Even if new letters were done right with Unicode, there's lots
of space in the Private Use areas.
* There was some discussion on this on the list in September, that ended with
someone finding 019E LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH LONG RIGHT LEG. Unfortunetly,
there's no corresponding LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH LONG RIGHT LEG, which
Lakota needs.
-- David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org http://dvdeug.dhis.org As centuries of pulp novels and late-night Christian broadcasting have taught us, anything we don't understand can be used for the purposes of Evil. -- Kenneth Hite, Suppressed Transmissions
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