Re: Cuneiform Free Variation Selectors

From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 19 2004 - 14:14:17 EST

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Cuneiform Free Variation Selectors"

    Michael Everson wrote at 5:55 PM on Monday, January 19, 2004:

    >At 12:39 -0500 2004-01-19, Dean Snyder wrote:
    >
    >>But NO ONE mentioned free variation selectors in the discussion until
    >>yesterday.
    >
    >But it's not MAGIC, Dean. Whether it's one of the "base signs plus
    >productive modifiers" you cooked up in December, or whether it's
    >viramas, or zero-width joiners, or variation selectors,

    It may not be magic but I was basically told it was taboo in Unicode.

    Before I ran across free variation selectors in Unicode, people were
    saying that this type of model was a bad thing in and of itself and that
    it was a glyph description language and out of scope.

    But now that I know that it is already part of the model for some scripts
    in Unicode and is being considered for further use, as in Han and Hebrew,
    I question whether this is the technical hair-brained, off-the-wall idea
    some have tried to make it out to be.

    But, of course, it bears more investigation.

    >all of those are just neutral characters to which some sort of
    >behaviour is ascribed.

    Which is all I'm asking for in cuneiform.

    Respectfully,

    Dean A. Snyder

    Assistant Research Scholar
    Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project
    Computer Science Department
    Whiting School of Engineering
    218C New Engineering Building
    3400 North Charles Street
    Johns Hopkins University
    Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218

    office: 410 516-6850
    www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi



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