From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Fri Oct 17 2003 - 11:07:31 CST
Rick McGowan wrote:
>Jill Ramonsky wrote...
>
>
>
>>It seems to me that if 0x110000 codepoints isn't a big enough space to fit in
>>the Klingon alphabet (and other alphabets which were similarly rejected)
>>then we need more codepoints. Simple as that.
>>
>>
>
>Rejection of Klingon has *absolutely* nothing to do with space. Jill
>quoted, but apparently did not *read* a statement (ostensibly from KLI but
>apparently only existing in a FAQ from a mail list not on the kli.org
>site). Let me quote again, the relevant point:
>
>
>
>>Klingon was rejected, but it failed because its potential users don't use it.
>>
See http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Klingon/piqad.html for some
discussion on this from Nick Nicholas. He makes some of the same
points: dozens of scripts out there are used more in transliteration
than in native form, by scholars. Who *writes* in Linear B? People
write in transliterations of it.
Note, too, that Klingon's PUA is used in jbovlaste
(http://www.lojban.org/jbovlaste/natlang/listing.html?lang=i-klingon).
>>In such a system no application need ever be rejected, for any reason.
>>Inclusion would be automatic for every submission.
>>
>>
>
>Who will write software to keep track of all that? Sorry, but that notion
>is economically preposterous. If anyone anytime can make a new character
>and have it automatically added to the standard, you don't have a very
>stable standard, you have a bunch of competing private uses, and nobody
>from one moment to the next has any idea what is actually in the standard
>or how it relates to anything else. (The notion is anti-communicative and
>entirely against the trend of history which, in all civilizations I know of
>in all time periods has tended toward greater standardization, not less.)
>The chaos of such a free-for-all would probably end up working itself out
>into a series of private agreements among user groups and industry
>cartels... Soon someone would get the bright idea of defining a
>circumscribed subset so more people could have some hope of communicating.
>And then we would be right back in Unicode land.
>
I have to confess, I personally would like to see a way to access the
higher planes somehow, eventually (e.g. hyper-surrogates or something).
But your argument is correct. Basically, an (effectively) infinite
space assignable at will by anyone is what we had already, before
computers were invented. Anyone could make up glyphs, and every writing
system in fact did. But it gets impossible to keep track of all of them.
~mark
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