From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Dec 24 2002 - 15:01:20 EST
At 12:54 PM 12/24/02 +0000, Michael Everson wrote:
>At 11:44 +0000 2002-12-24, John Clews wrote:
>
>>However, just out of interest, is there a brief rationale from those
>>involved in UTC as to why that separation of Greek and Coptic is a
>>"good thing"
>
>http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2444.pdf
>
>>while any proposal to add a Cyrillic Q and W, ... would be a "bad thing"?
One of the problems is that modern computer character sets have been
Latin+Cyrillic, allowing users easy access to Latin Q and W when processing
Cyrillic. Essentially, existing character sets before Unicode, in other
words legacy character sets, have set the precedent for this unification.
Disunifying this belatedly in Unicode would introduce non-negligible data
conversion problems. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that Latin
and Cyrillic Q and W do not look noticably different, if at all, which
means that the even the (inadvertant) future use of Latin Q and W cannot be
ruled out, perpetuating the incidences of dual encoding.
Coptic does not have this legacy issue, for one there aren't any parts of
8859 that can be used for Coptic.
>Mostly it has to do with inertia and attachment to earlier (false)
>unifications. Having said that, it remains for appropriate papers to be
>written to convince the hard-liners of the wisdom of these
>disunifications. That takes time and effort.
In this particular example I think that is a gross mischaracterization. The
mere act of writing more papers will not change the interoperability and
legacy problems mentioned above.
A./
PS: the situation for Georgian is yet again different, in my view it has
few analogies with either the Greek/Coptic or Kurdish examples, but I have
nothing new to add to the discussion at this time so I elided the mention
of it in the quoted text above.
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