From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed May 12 2004 - 03:39:54 CDT
On 11/05/2004 10:15, Mark Davis wrote:
>I do not always agree with Michael, but your conclusion is absurd.
>
>1. Michael has made some very good contributions to the work of script encoding,
>which involves quite a bit of work. Experts in academic communities are free to
>do the same; and if they care about their areas of work, they will. And unless
>they are living in caves in the mountains of Tibet, there is no reason for them
>not to be aware of Unicode and its impact of the ability to encode text on their
>area of study.
>
>
I agree. Of course Michael has done a lot of good work. So have others.
But no one expert's understanding is perfect, and so their opinion needs
to be checked, wherever possible with members of the user community, or
of as many as possible of a range of user communities. This is what was
lacking with Phoenician, also apparently with Coptic (originally) and
Kurdish although I now understand that the responsibility for this was
not Michael's. The problem arose only when users of Phoenician made
their own contributions, and they were rejected as absurd and not worthy
of serious answer.
>2. Michael is not the only person working on scripts; he is one of many people.
>So there is quite a bit of cross-checking, plus the opportunity for public
>review.
>
>
I am glad to hear it.
>3. My issue was not so much with Michael's conclusion as with the way in which
>he expressed himself.
>
>
So was mine. In fact I now agree with his conclusion.
>The issues with modern scripts are relatively straightforward (although even
>there, there can be reasonable disagreement). When we get into historic scripts,
>we do need to make the effort to refine the model that we are using to encode
>scripts, to avoid the kinds of pointless discussions that we have seen lately.
>This involves a review of the factors that we should take into account in
>determining whether to unify two scripts or not, to make sure that they make
>sense for historic scripts. That is already on the agenda for the next UTC
>meeting in June.
>
>
Agreed, and I am glad to hear it.
>Mark
>
>
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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