> From: Thomas Chan [mailto:thomas@atlas.datexx.com]
> e.g., If someone asked 1-2 (pre-Unicode 3.1) years ago the
> question, "Can
> I write Cantonese with Unicode?", the answer would have been
> "no" or "not
> really". If it were asked today, the answer would be "yes".
> But try that
> question today with other minority Chinese languages
> substituted in it,
> and the answer is still pretty much a "no" or "not really".
Hmmm - on the other hand, given the effectively boundless syllabary,
wouldn't the answer be "mostly" for all dialects? True, some dialects fit
better than others, but still, I doubt that any dialect is unusable. In any
case, I do not think that this list is a good place for tracking the
encoding status of various languages, which is effectively what you are
proposing.
> BTW, what do you consider to be a "darn small userbase", numberwise?
> Would the UCAS or Cherokee userbases be too "small" by your
> standards to
> include a mention of them?
Probably. I think I had best make clear here. I am talking about
what I feel belongs in the "Languages and Scripts" list, NOT what belongs in
Unicode! As I see it, if a language isn't in active use on the internet
(above some arbitrary but small threshhold), it shouldn't be listed, on the
assumption that there isn't any content.
> I'm sure there are more than twelve people who use it for
> writing and/or
> research, though. Start counting with the number of people who write
> in it, and add to that figure the researchers and their
> assistants (i.e.,
> their students) who are doing the surveys...
I deliberately do not include the researchers, since they should
already know the name of the script... ;-)
> > > And this is without going into historical alternative
> ways of writing
> > > Chinese, such as the prolific Guanhua Zimu alphabet/syllabary
> > > used in the
> > > 1900s-1920s.
> >
> > ...which we don't really need to do, I think, since
> we're trying to
> > stick to the useful stuff.
>
> What do you consider "useful"? What one person considers "useless" is
> "useful" to someone else. Without specific requirements like userbase
> size, economic power, cultural significance, extant writings,
> etc, I don't
> think we can start making any claims about usefulness.
You listed an END date for that script, which I translate as "dead
script". Since dead scripts are of interest only to academics and
hobbyists, who already know their names, I consider it useless to put it on
the list. I mean no judgement of the script, its language(s), or any people
who have used it.
> Anyway, I don't see usefulness as one of the requisites for
> inclusion on
> the list in question.
This is where we disagree, perhaps. I see three useful lists:
1.) A brief list for nonexperts who need to communicate in an
unfamiliar tongue. This list would be limited to languages which have shown
some small presence on the internet.
2.) A comprehensive listing of languages and the scripts they use.
3.) A list of the encoding status of scripts by language (to deal
with, among other things, the Chinese dialect problem).
I had assumed (yeah, I know...) that (1) was "Languages and their
Scripts", (2) would be found in the Ethnologue, and (3) was the Roadmap;
however I discovered today that the Ethnologue does not appear to list
scripts. Is this so, or was I not looking in the right place?
> Its clear to me that you have a very low opinion of minority
> languages,
> scripts, and characters.
No, although I admit that it may seem that way from this thread. I
hope that my explanations above have cleared this up.
> Whether or not transliteration is beyond the
> scope of the list in question is one issue, and I agree that
> it would open
> up the possibility of listing almost every language with almost every
> script (or at least, Latin). But what's your rationale for
> claims like
> "bastard children"? (And what is that supposed to mean, anyway?)
It means that transliteration scripts are not native to the
language. Perhaps I am hypersensitive to this, having had pinyin forced
down my throat by an overzealous teacher (I am among those who find it to be
as much hindrance as help), but I think that there is a certain mentality
extant that it is acceptable to use transliteration instead of a language's
native script; I consider this mentality to be simply wrong, and feel that
listing transliteration scripts for languages would give undue
respectability to using transliteration scripts, especially given that
Unicode removes the need for most transliteration scripts.
/|/|ike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Aug 14 2001 - 15:25:29 EDT