From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 15:25:15 EDT
Rick McGowan wrote:
>>More than once during this discussion, I've thought that something
>>approaching a general
>>principle might be stated as 'related dead scripts should be unified;
>>their living
>>descendants may be separately encoded'.
>
> Personally I don't accept that as a general principle for several reasons.
> One example: nobody has yet quite demonstrated that all the dead Brahmi
> relatives, even excluding obvious near-modern scripts like Modi, are
> actually completely unifiable in a way that would be implementable and
> meaningful from rendering to sorting, etc, etc, and would satisfy all the
> relevant scholars. However, there is a current in Brahmi scholarship that
> obviously would like to unify as least *some* of the dead relatives. As
> usual one question is which are to be unified, etc.
I didn't think I needed to clarify the principle to state that un-unifiable things should
not be unified. Disparate rendering behaviour is grounds for disunification, whatever
general principles might be applied in considering related scripts that might be unified.
The principle I suggests -- only as a possible guide to thinking about the issue -- would
be applied *after* one had determined whether there were any practical impediments to
unification.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com I often play against man, God says, but it is he who wants to lose, the idiot, and it is I who want him to win. And I succeed sometimes In making him win. - Charles Peguy
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