From: Andrew West (andrewcwest@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Apr 05 2006 - 03:34:48 CST
On 05/04/06, Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> The Phaistos disk characters run up against one major objection from TUS 4.0
> Section 1.1 (Coverage) Paragraph 3: 'Note, however, that the Unicode
> Standard does not encode idiosyncratic, personal, novel, or private-use
> characters, nor does it encode logos or graphics.'
The Phaistos disc characters are not obviously idiosyncratic,
personal, novel, or private-use characters. The fact that they are
only found in a single primary source needs to be taken into account,
but that is not a reason to automatically disqualify them from
encoding. There are many characters in the standard that are encoded
on the basis of usage in a single primary source, and can be
considered to be idiosyncratic, but which are nevertheless encoded
because that source is important and people quote from it (I'm
thinking particularly of characters for phonetic notation here, but
CJK ideographs are also a rich source for idiosyncratic, personal and
novel characters).
> The Phaistos disk
> characters are not being encoded to enable meaning to be encoded -
The fact that people do not necessarily know what any particular
Phaistos disc character means is also not a valid reason not to encode
them. There are many CJK-B and forthcoming CJK-C ideographs for which
the meaning is unknown (my edition of the Kangxi dictionary has a long
appendix listing characters whose meaning and/or pronunciation is
unknown). When Chinese oracle bone characters are encoded (and this is
now just a question of when not if), a large proportion of the
characters will still be undeciphered, and it is inevitable that some
of the characters encoded will be glyph variants of other characters,
but that's something you just have to live with when dealing with
undeciphered or semi-deciphered scripts. In the case of Phaistos, as
Michael has pointed out, the fact that the symbols are created from
individual stamps and they are all quite distinct from each other
means that it highly unlikely that any of the proposed characters are
simple glyph variants.
> they are
> proposed as a handy way to call up certain graphics, namely the pictures of
> certain characters.
>
I have to agree that the Phasitos characters are being proposed for
encoding "as a handy way to call up certain graphics, namely the
pictures of certain characters", but exactly what is wrong with that?
Unicode does encode symbols (just take a look at the range of graphic
symbols encoded in the Miscellaneous Symbols bloick), some commonly
used and some at least as rare as the Phaistos characters. The Yijing
Hexagram Symbols and TaiXuan Jing Symbols blocks are both obvious
examples of a set of graphic symbols that are derived from a single
source (the "Yi Jing" and "Taixuan Jing" respectively). I doubt that
the Taixuan Jing symbols enjoy a greater usage than the Phaistos disc
characters.
The Phaistos disc characters are required for serious, scholarly
study, and I cannot see any reason to deny their user community the
convenience, stability and consistency that encoded characters bring.
Andrew
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