From: Patrick Andries (Patrick.Andries@xcential.com)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 18:32:06 EST
----- Original Message -----
De: "Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>
> This is the role of diacritics and symbols added to the target script, so
> that no information from the text written in the source script is lost.
Yes, I know this but you cannot go from Berber written in Arabic to
Tifinagh or Latin Scripts without losing some information. At least,
according to some scholars' system. Do you also plan to modify the Arabic
script as used by the current user of Berbere before coding the Tifinagh
script ?
> You seem to forget that Tifinagh is not a unified script,
(sigh)
> but a set of separate scripts where the same glyphs are used with distinct
semantic functions.
Phonemic, I suspect. In any case, what is the problem with several
characters having the same "representative" glyph in the code chart (they
also have a name) ? I believe this is already the case for other characters.
Some characters don't even have no glyph representation.
> And I think it is the major issue which requires to choose a policy
>for its encoding. If characters are encoded by their names (as they should
in
> Unicode)
Maybe (their phonemic value seems a good candidate to me, since letters may
have different names in different areas).
> then we are unable to produce an accurate chart showing "representative
> glyphs", as no variant of the script covers the whole abstract character
> set, and so this would require several charts, i.e. multiple glyphs for
the same
> abstract character.
I don't see the problem, isn't this the whole idea in distinguishing between
glyph and characters ?
> In this condition, why couldn't Latin glyphs be among
> these, when they already have the merit of covering the whole abstract
> character set covered by all scripts in the Tifinagh family?
Because it is best to use Tifinagh glyphs as representative glyphs of the
Tifinagh script? Because the character names also specify the value of
characters? And because, even if the script is not unified and some sign are
not used everywhere, many signs are. I counted 16 common glyphs between the
Hoggar variety and the Académie berbère's one, out a total of 28 glyphs
found in these two varieties. Nine characters use different glyphs in the
two varieties and 3 characters exists in Académie berbère's proposal but
have no mapping (even ambiguous ones) in the Hoggar's variety. Only in the
case of vowels, where the Hoggar variety which does not distinguish between
vowels and semi-vowels (has 2 signs instead of 4), would it be ambiguous to
use the Hoggar signs since the Académie Berbère uses different signs for the
semivowels /w/ and /j/. But I agree that chosing the representative glyphs
may become a sensitive issue if the Tifinagh script is to be unified, each
school might feel offended that its preferred glyphs were not chosen in
ISO/IEC 10646. This does not necessarily mean that Tifinagh should be
encoded with an easy Latin mapping in mind.
P. A.
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