Re: AW: Greek/Etruscan/Gothic Unification Proposal

From: Mark Leisher (mleisher@crl.nmsu.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 21 1997 - 19:45:40 EST


    John> Marc Wilhelm Kuester wrote:
>> [T]o use Mark Davis' words: native speakers or experts in the
>> case of dead languages should consider the result as being a
>> correct and readable representation of the text.

The phrase "... native speakers or experts in the case of dead languages
..." is a bit odd. Does anyone know of a native speaker of a dead
language? Or is a language considered dead when the population of
native speakers falls below some threshold?

>> [E]xperts in the field would consider it acceptable (not
>> necessarily beautiful!) to find their sources rendered in the
>> other script and vice versa: [i]f a majority or even a sizable
>> minority would not, then give that script a distinct code range.

    John> In that case, Gothic should be unified with Latin, because
    John> almost all Gothicists, except those actually concerned with
    John> palaeography, seem to consider Latin transliteration perfectly
    John> acceptable! The same seems to be true of
    John> Etruscan/Oscan/Umbrian.

As Herr Professor Jost Gippert pointed out in one of his papers (I have
it at work somewhere), it behooves us to encode ancient
scripts in such a way as they can be accurately represented using both
today's conventions (i.e. glosses in academic papers) and in their
myriad historical forms. Although I do not recall the details at the
moment, I seem to recall he made some good arguments about giving
ancient scripts their own encoding ranges.

I will post the URL to this paper later this weekend and see if my
recollections have decayed or not :-) With luck, someone on the list
may already have the URL and post it before I get to it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
mleisher@crl.nmsu.edu
Mark Leisher "A designer knows he has achieved perfection
Computing Research Lab not when there is nothing left to add, but
New Mexico State University when there is nothing left to take away."
Box 30001, Dept. 3CRL -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Las Cruces, NM 88003



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