At 09:23 1997-1-24 -0500, Johan van Wingen wrote:
>It would be a far better idea to enable Mr. Garibashvili to attend the
encourage
>next ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 Plenary meeting, last week of June on Cyprus.
>There he may comment as the Georgian delegate (official or not, that
>depends on the relation to ISO) on the correctness of the Georgian code
>table in ISO/IEC 10646-1. The inclusion of Georgian capital letters was
>and is very controversial, and SC2 is the body to decide on possible
>modification, and noone else.
At the CEN Seminar in Bled last fall, a Georgian confirmed me that there is
no such thing as a notion of case in Georgian. He said that there were 2
traditional typographical styles for this script but he did not understand
why characters were double-coded in the UCS. Perhaps the question asked by
experts to Georgians were not precise enough at the time of UCS design for
Georgian and those who answered, non-experts in character coding, made a
confusion between characters and glyphs (and perhaps the "case" meaning was
lost in the translation to Georgian and misinterpreted, which would not be
surprising, given that the notion is unknown in that script). These are the
only reasonable hypothesis. But for sure, now, in ordering these characters,
we'll have to make them equivalent in ISO/IEC 14651, but distinguishable at
the case level, artificially I'm afraid. Because, of course,
searching/sorting has to make them equal sometime, distinguishable in other
times when both styles are used.
Double-coding is certainly very unfortunate. Ideally, we should have
obsoleted one set, but it is perhaps too late and this is less critical
anyway than for Korean. We could just recommend to use one style rather than
another one.
I am sure I did understand what he said because this Georgian participant
(about my age) spoke plain and excellent French, it was his first foreign
language, so no misunderstanding on my part.
Alain LaBonti
Quibec
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