Re: Arid Canaanite Wasteland (was: Re: New contribution)

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sun May 02 2004 - 13:57:12 CDT


Rick McGowan rick@unicode.org wrote:

> We (in UTC) have seen situations before where one group desires an
> encoding for a script that is strongly opposed by another group --
> even for the *same* language in the *same* historical period.

Ol Chiki, for example.

There is a { large, vocal } group that opposes the encoding of Ol Chiki
because of fears it will somehow encourage the spread of an "inferior"
regional variant of the Santali language, spoken by those Santalis who
prefer Ol Chiki over a Latin orthography. The group claims that if Ol
Chiki were encoded, users of Santali would be "forced" to use it instead
of Latin, thus causing the Santali language to "deviate from the path of
rectitude" and maybe also causing the earth to collapse into the sun, or
something.

I've been thinking about these claims about Ol Chiki as I read recent
comments that separate encoding of Phoenician would screw up text
searches that have been optimized for Phoenician text encoded using
Hebrew or "high-ASCII" font hacks.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/



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