Re: Drumming them out

From: jcowan@reutershealth.com
Date: Tue May 04 2004 - 15:11:29 CDT


Michael Everson scripsit:

> Enshrining "justifications" in the proposal documents really all that
> important? It sounds like busywork to me.

No, this point I insist on. It's really, really important, as we descend
further into the labyrinth of difficult choices (how to encode? what to
unify or not unify? what to provide for at all?), the choices must be
publicly defensible in order to stem an endless string of I-told-you-sos.
We may get those anyway, to be sure.

For example, censeo ut Rongorongo delenda est; it requires some 800
codepoints to encode all of 26 documents (inscribed objects, in fact)
containing just over 14,000 characters of running text, of which we
understand precisely nothing (except for a lunar calendar and a possible
genealogy), not even whether they constitute writing properly so called
(as opposed to mere pictograms or even mnemonics like old Naxi "writing"),
and have no prospect of doing more than multiplying theories.

This is a default view. If there are substantial counterarguments,
they need to be publicly stated (not necessarily now).

OTOH, I am quite ignorant of Egyptian demotic as mentioned in the Coptic
proposal, but I am rather surprised to find that it's not on the Roadmaps
anywhere. Is it unified with hieroglyphic?

Finally, I have read the Coptic proposal (I missed the announcement of
it, evidently) and praise it.

-- 
It was dreary and wearisome.  Cold clammy winter still held way in this
forsaken country.  The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark
greasy surfaces of the sullen waters.  Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed
up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers.
        --"The Passage of the Marshes"          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan


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