Rick said:
> The serious scholars seem to already have software systems that are
> adequate for their needs -- e.g. the Manel de Codage.
That is sufficient for some needs, but clearly does not suffice for
standardization of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which is what the German
Egyptologists, in particular, seem to be worrying about.
> However, as
> Carl-Martin Bunz has pointed out on several occasions, there is a conflict
> here, as with many historical scripts, between the mere citizens who just
> want 700 or 800 neat hieroglyphics to mess with, and the serious scholars
> who want nothing to be encoded until they are satisfied of its perfection
> for their purposes.
>
> Some people just want to be able to send around Hieroglyphs in the
> Gardiner set, or similar, for populist purposes -- as Carl-Martin says,
> "funware" -- and sometimes armchair scholarship. Many serious scholars
> don't want to see that situation because they (apparently) fear it would
> undermine their eventual, more perfect proposal, and lead the populace
> astray. Either that or they can't be bothered wasting their time on such
> frivolity.
This is an element of truth in this, but I think it overstates the case.
Some of the Egyptologists are concerned with what they see as serious
flaws in the Manuel de codage, and are legitimately worried that if
it is simply encoded quickly in the international standard, that they
will thereafter forever be hampered by erroneous unifications or splits
of characters when they have completed enough research on the repertoire
to come around with a more completely researched repertoire proposal
at a later time.
The code it now because it is useful argument could have been applied
to pre-unification Han, for example. We could have just stuck in
JIS X 0208 quickly, "because it is useful and widely used", and only
later come around and tried to figure out how to do a unified repertoire
and ordering for Han characters. It might have been a feasible way to
approach the problem, but it would not have been ideal for something
which, when done, becomes permanent.
And in a case like Egyptian hieroglyphics, where we have some bone fide
experts in the field saying, wait, there are problems with the repertoire
and the identification of characters here, and when we are dealing with
a very large complex set, it just makes sense to proceed carefully.
The other aspect here is that it is not just a matter of serious scholars
who "can't be bothered wasting their time on such frivolity." In part,
this is simply a problem of doing the work to get the right people
sitting down to talk together. As for any complex script encoding, you
need to make the time and opportunities for the character standards
experts to communicate with the language and script specialists.
Frankly, the German Egyptologists don't yet know how to encode
characters. That isn't something you learn in university. There
is an educational process that needs to go on each time a new
community of scholars is approached about encoding an historic
script.
>
> So we're stuck with not being able to encode anything. And nobody is
> really talking about how to compromise, or about what might be reasonable
> to encode as a first step for popular purposes yet not "undermine" a later
> more scholarly encoding extension.
Actually, people are starting to talk about that. And there is
a meeting scheduled in a little over two weeks in Tübingen,
Germany, where some of the German scholars, in particular, will
get a chance to meet Unicode experts face to face to start this
process.
It is unlikely that encoding of Egyptian hieroglyphics is going
to be resolved next month. :-( But at least some education about
character encoding and the issues of historic scripts can take
place -- and that may help to start some action on this particular
encoding proposal.
--Ken
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