From: John Cowan (cowan@ccil.org)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 07:01:04 CDT
Peter Kirk scripsit:
> >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.
In addition, it's important to always remember that "collation" is a
cover term for both sorting *and* searching. Collating Hebrew with
"Phoenician" at the first level means that a search using Hebrew
letters will find "Phoenician" text as well.
(I am using horror quotes to remind people that Unicode "Phoenician"
includes many non-Punic 22CWSAs, particularly Palaeo-Hebrew.)
If indeed Serbs prefer collation equivalence between Cyrillic and
Latin (which can only be a tailored preference, of course; in general
we don't want to do that), this means not only that they will see
the two interfiled in a sorted list, but also that searching for a
Serbian word in Cyrillic will find it in Latin and vice versa.
-- John Cowan jcowan@reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan Female celebrity stalker, on a hot morning in Cairo: "Imagine, Colonel Lawrence, ninety-two already!" El Auruns's reply: "Many happy returns of the day!"
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