From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Sat May 14 2005 - 16:02:32 CDT
Michael Everson wrote:
>> So mysticism is a mark-up issue, not an encoding issue. That sounds
>> fine to me.
> The identity of a letter has to do with the linguistic entity it refers
> to (typically a sound but sometimes a more abstract linguistic concept)
> and its usage in a writing system, not to any emanation of vital energy
> of cosmic origin which can help a person make life decisions. *That* is
> mysticism and it is out of scope of the Universal Character Set.
Fine. Fine. This is all fine. [In another forum I would raise objections to your
pantheistic characterisation of mysticism, but this is hardly the place for such
discussions, nor are they relevant.]
There is the matter of texts that deal with mystical traditions to consider, and if there
is a mystic significance, in a given tradition, between glyph variants of the same
character, as Alexander is suggesting is the case for Glagolitsa, then in the context of
such texts the preservation of specific glyph identity is obviously important. Since, as
you rightly say, this falls outside the scope of the purpose of the Universal Character
Set, it seems most helpful to suggest to Alexander how such distinctions might be made in
using mark-up, smart font features, etc., since the mystic significance -- indeed, any
significance -- of glyph variants obviously cannot be adequately discussed in plain text.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: Truth and tolerance, by Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger as was A century of philosophy, by Hans Georg Gadamer
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