Re Mixed up priorities: - invented scripts

From: Christopher John Fynn (cfynn@dircon.co.uk)
Date: Fri Oct 22 1999 - 04:55:55 EDT


Robert Brady wrote:

> You are reducing the plausability of your argument below, which is totally
> unrelated. There are about 4 interesting fictional alphabets to encode :
> Shavian, Tengwar, Cirth, and Klingon. These add up to less than 500
> codepoints. There is really no possibility of UTF-16 being filled, let
> alone UCS-4! (Of these proposals : Shavian, Cirth, and Klingon are stable
> and uncontroversial technically, but still have not gotten into the
> standard!)

Only four? Inventing languages, alphabets and grammars and then writing
books & poetry in them was a minor scholastic pastime in Tibet. Tibetans
also have whole writing systems which are supposed to represent the
languages of dakini, demigods, various kinds of demons and other
 non-humans. There are at least a couple of hundred of these.

 I suspect there must be similar things in other cultures too.

 If the door is opened to invented scripts and languages made up
in the English speaking world there is no real justification for not
encoding similar things from other cultures if someone makes the
proposal.

 However if it is accepted that there is a need to encode these fictional
and non-human scripts perhaps a whole plane should be assigned to
this sort of thing and some sort of official volunteer body like be set
up to look after it. Or maybe there should just be a Private-use plane.

 - Chris



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