From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed May 12 2004 - 07:36:08 CDT
On 11/05/2004 04:39, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 07:34 -0700 2004-05-10, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>> Is there any really good reason not to mix two scripts, which are
>> according to many people actually variants of one script but which
>> are (if your proposal is accepted) seperately encoded for the
>> convenience of some scholars?
>
>
> Yes. The default template is for default behaviour. Most people in the
> world use a tiny subset of characters available, and don't care much
> about what happens in scripts which are not their own. ...
Absolutely. Most people don't care at all what happens with scripts like
Phoenician. The only people who do care are scholars and other users of
the particular script. So it is makes sense to offer them what they want
as the default behaviour - as long as they can agree on what they want.
Of course it must not mess up collation of other scripts, but the
proposed interfiling of Hebrew and Phoenician does not do this.
> ... This sort of battle was fought over Runic: Runologists wanted the
> Runes to be sorted in Latin alphabetical order, but this didn't make
> sense to the other clients of the script. The Latin ordering is
> considered to be a special tailoring.
This is a different issue, because different users did not agree on what
they wanted. I am referring to a hypothetical situation in which all
users of a script are agreed that they want it to be collated together
with another script. I say "hypothetical" because we have not yet
established whether this is actually what all users of Phoenician want,
just that it is apparently what some of them want.
>
>> This sounds to me like the kind of rule which is made to be broken.
>> If all the 22 CSWA scripts are collated together by default, this
>> would significantly reduce the objections to encoding them as
>> separate scripts.
>
>
> I would have just as many objections to doing that as I would with
> unifying it with Hebrew. Users don't expect this kind of interfiling
> when looking things up in ordered lists. Interfiling of scripts
> impedes legibility.
Well, I see the point. But presumably the only people who would collate
a text containing a mixture of Hebrew and Phoenician, for example, are
those who know and understand both scripts. For anyone else this is a
matter of garbage in, garbage out. So it should be up to these users to
decide whether the legibility concern, which is a real one, is more
important than their otherwise expressed preference for interfiling.
The implication for me is that such proposals require further careful
thought, not outright rejection.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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