From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Thu Jul 07 2005 - 12:12:45 CDT
On 07/07/2005 17:08, Peter Constable wrote:
>>From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
>>
>>
>On Behalf
>
>
>>Of asadek@st-elias.com
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
>>NO : it means they must behave the same way and that in this case
>>as Phoenician and Old Hebrew are linguistically sometimes unseparable
>>and Old Hebrew is even written written in Phoenician that this is
>>
>>
>useless.
>
>The fact that old Turkish is written in Arabic while recent Turkish is
>written in Latin has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Arabic and
>Latin should be encoded with the same or different characters.
>
>
>
This is a false analogy. The change in Turkish from Arabic to Latin
script was a deliberate and discontinuous change from one script to
another, and also not a one-to-one mapping. The change in Hebrew from
old or palaeo-Hebrew (similar to Phoenician) to "square" Hebrew (similar
to the Unicode Hebrew reference glyphs) was a matter of gradual
evolution from one style of handwriting to another. It was also a
one-to-one change, although at a later stage distinct final forms of
some letters evolved (and later still vowel points were added). The
situation is much more closely analogous to the Fraktur style of Latin
script, which differs from regular (reference glyph) styles in letter
shapes and also in final form etc rules; or like the difference between
modern cursive Hebrew and square Hebrew. And Unicode has judged Fraktur
as not sufficiently different from regular Latin for separate encoding
(except for special mathematical purposes), and similarly for modern
cursive Hebrew.
Michael Everson rejected the proposition which he inferred that "we
shouldn't work to encode scripts used by scholars". But this leave open
the question of whether scholars actually use any particular script, as
a distinct script rather than as a set of glyph variants. After all, the
primary justification given for a certain proposed script was not its
scholarly use, but its use in popular accounts of the history of the
alphabet.
Meanwhile it surprises me that Uniscribe does not already recognise code
points 00010800-00010FFF as RTL characters, as these have long been
reserved in the Roadmap for RTL scripts. If this had been done at an
appropriate time, there would be no need for repeated changes to
Uniscribe to support each of the 22 individual RTL scripts roadmapped
for this block.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.10/43 - Release Date: 06/07/2005
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