On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, John Cowan wrote:
>1) Involving Unicode with That Elvish Stuff will bring it into contempt
>and ridicule. We don't need this.
It will also bring visibility to Unicode work, and goodwill on behalf of
the synthetic language/script community. It offers us the possibility of
marketing Unicode as What Makes Elvish Work.
>2) The people who want Elvish encodings are only doing it for the hell
>of it, and can very well carry on with kludges at one level or another.
>They don't need this.
So do we assume that "doing it for a need" is somehow better than "doing
it for the hell of it"? This is a difficult line to draw, since having
newly created/encoded scripts to play with is a serious need to people who
like to play with such things.
Furthermore, one might say there is no reason to encode anything beyond
the basic set of unified ideographs -- keeping anything but a single
script alive is already "doing it for the hell of it". It would seem like
any reasoning strong enough to get us out of this will have to bring
practical/profitability reasons into the picture, and beyond that, Elvish
simply sells. As does Klingon.
>3) Life is too short to worry about fictional encodings. Nobody needs
>this.
I.e. an assumption is at work, here, telling us to disregard synthetic
scripts as somehow inferior to "natural" ones. We might say, then, that
any script purposefully built (vs. decentrally evolved) is not suitable
for encoding. If I'm not mistaken, this would exclude quite a number of
writing systems.
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
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