RE: interleaved ordering (was RE: Phoenician)

From: Language Analysis Systems, Inc. Unicode list reader (Unicode-mail@las-inc.com)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 14:15:44 CDT

  • Next message: E. Keown: "Re: Multiple Directions (was: Re: Coptic/Greek (Re: Phoenician))"

    >>This whole discussion of interleaved sorting has veered off into the
    >>ditch. Now maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention (quite
    >>possible, as I pretty much lost patience with the whole Phoenician
    >>thread a LONG time ago)
    >
    >Probably, I would hazard a guess, because you are not a user of these
    diascripts.

    You're right; I'm not. But I think I would have lost patience with this
    discussion even if I was. It's been spinning around in circles, veering
    wildly off-topic, and degenerating into ad-hominem attacks for quite
    some time now. While there may still be occasional comments that
    advance the discussion, the signal to noise ratio is extremely low, and
    I'm not sure much of anyone is listening to each other anymore.

    >>Do you really expect-- in EITHER
    >>case-- to have long lists of words that need to be mechanically
    sorted?
    >
    >Yes.
    >
    >
    >>Do you expect it to happen often enough that hacking together a Perl
    >>script to do it once isn't going to get the job done?
    >
    >Yes.

    I'm not convinced yet. I understand your position to be in favor of
    representing Phoenician and its friends with the existing codes for
    Hebrew. If you do this, nothing special has to happen to get
    interleaved sorting because the actual letterforms involved become a
    presentation issue. In theory, even if Phoenician is encoded as a
    separate script, you can keep on doing what you're doing. If the other
    Semitic scholars also keep using the existing Hebrew code points, you
    don't need anything from Unicode, and anything that gets added you can
    safely ignore.

    So do you need an interleaved sorting order because you expect to be
    interchanging data with other people who have decided to use the new
    code points, or because you intend to use them yourself? Or is it a
    font issue (i.e., you'll want to use fonts that only map the new code
    points to the glyphs you want to see)?

    But if you _do_ interchange with people who use the new code points,
    you're right-- you do need an interleaved sorting order. So then the
    question goes to the people who are arguing against putting this into
    the default UCA sort order-- if the default UCA sort order interleaves
    Hebrew and Phoenician to make life easier for people like Dean, who does
    it hurt? Are there other user communities out there whose lives would
    be made harder if Hebrew and Phoenician were equivalent at the first
    level? Or are you concerned about setting a dangerous precedent? Or is
    it just the principle of the thing?

    >>Both are justification for an interleaved sort order, but really, how
    >>often will either use case come up?
    >
    >Well, for just one case, if you're a Dead Sea scroll scholar (one of
    the more populated sub-disciplines in >Semitic scholarship) all the time
    and every day.

    To do what? I'm not arguing with you; I'm just curious and completely
    ignorant.

    --Rich Gillam
      Language Analysis Systems, Inc.



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