From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Sat May 24 2003 - 12:35:39 EDT
Philippe Verdy wrote on 05/22/2003 04:00:22 PM:
> Unicode (which accepts proposal from influent provided that they
> donate time and money)
The Unicode Consortium will accept proposals from *anyone*, though expects
people to understand that if they want new characters they will have to
take some responsibility for making it happen. That may be more or less
what you meant, but just so there is no confusion, there is no requirement
than donations be made to the Consortium, and paying for membership is not
required in order to submit a proposal.
> Generally, searchers and linguists prefer to work with librarians
> and with their national standard organization, so they tend to use
> the more bureaucratic way via ISO10646, unless they have already
> existing large databases of pulications for which they ask a
> standard to Unicode to facilitate compatible interchanges...
I think that is an overgeneralization. There are a substantial number of
linguists and philologists/paleographers that channel their requests
through the Unicode Consortium, and not all of them do this because they
have large databases.
> The case of independant groups of users (for example Klingon
> supporters, or searchers studying an archaic or minor language which
> only interests a poor country without public support from national
> librarians) is difficult here
The facts do not exactly substantiate that: note, for instance, some
characters approved in the last year or so such as the Devanagari glottal
(for the Limbu language of Nepal), Cyrillic Ghe/ghe with descender (for
Siberian Yupik), and various Arabic characters used for the Parkari
language; and also the proposal submitted for Syloti Nagri script (which I
expect will be approved at the next meeting). None of these proposals was
done with the assistance of librarians or other such major national
agencies, though I guess you'd say it was done with something akin to
"public support" insofar as the proposals were submitted by SIL
International. It is in the interest of assisting minor language
communities that SIL is investing resources to work on such proposals and
to maintain a membership in the Consortium (associate membership -- it
would be a full membership except that, as a non-profit, the annual fee of
$12,000 has thus far been beyond what we can manage).
- Peter
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Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
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