From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Tue May 04 2004 - 08:10:50 CDT
At 11:53 +1000 2004-05-01, Nick Nicholas wrote:
>Coptic could have stayed unified with Greek,
Certainly not!
>and myself I'm still not convinced the distinction between Greek and
>Coptic in bilingual editions is not truly just a font issue.
Plain-text searching of Crum's dictionary, for instance, is a
perfectly valid requirement, and one which was brought to bear on the
disunification.
>So the question again becomes, not whether the scripts are
>historically or graphemically distinct, but what the body of users
>is that wants them disunified.
The distinction itself is a strong reason to disunify. We've done
that with other scripts. And we will again, I'll warrant.
>And the "fonts are k00l" crowd of enthusiasts :-) which the review
>of hieroglyphics has already mentioned; and I know we shouldn't
>dismiss them out of hand and all, but why can't they be accommodated
>by a font switch too?
Because we are beyond ASCII font hacks. The Phoenician block will
allow font switching between a recognizably similar family of writing
systems. Same as we have for Syriac, or for Old Italic. And remember
-- most Etruscan scholars transliterate. But Unicode is not elitist.
It's universal.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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