From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Jan 05 2005 - 06:49:58 CST
On 04/01/2005 23:40, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> ...
>
>>In discussions a few months ago about a controversial proposed new
>>script,
>>
>>
>
>A cute way to reintroduce the argument about Phoenician to the
>list.
>
>
No, Ken. I do not want to reopen discussion of Phoenician in this forum.
I deliberately avoided using the name so that no one would think I did.
I just want to clarify an issue concerning the Unicode (and by
implication 10646) conformance clauses, in the context of the alleged EU
law.
> ...
>
>If and when Phoenician characters are encoded in the standard,
>nothing in the standard, whether in the conformance clause or
>elsewhere, will force anyone to use those characters for
>representing Phoenician (or Punic or Ancient Hebrew) texts. If they
>are used to using Modern Square Hebrew *transliterations* for
>Phoenician (or Paleo-Hebrew), they can continue to do so, and
>nobody will stop them. Nor will their implementations suddenly
>become "nonconformant" or non-interoperable.
>
>
>
I was not referring to transliterations.
>>I was assured that
>>there was nothing in the Unicode conformance clauses which prevented
>>users from continuing to use such masquerading font solutions, which
>>have of course been in existence since long before Unicode.
>>
>>
>
>This "masquerading font solution" is a transliteration masquerading
>as a masquerade.
>
>
And this is what I was referring to. Let me repeat the question partly
in your words: "If and when Phoenician characters are encoded in the
standard, [will there be anything] in the standard, whether in the
conformance clause or elsewhere, [which] will force anyone to use those
characters for representing Phoenician (or Punic or Ancient Hebrew)
texts" USING THEIR ORIGINAL GLYPHS? I was assured repeatedly, during the
long discussion on Phoenician, that there was nothing, even when using
"Phoenician" glyphs mapped to Hebrew code points.
>Whether a particular transliteration can be *implemented* in
>terms of a simple font shift depends on the nature of the
>transliteration. In the case of Canaanite and Modern
>Square Hebrew, well, you can set up a nice one-to-one mapping
>of 22 letters and hack away with your fonts. In the case
>of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Latin, the transliteration
>relationship is too complicated to do a simple mapping for,
>so nobody even attempts to do this with just a font mapping.
>Instead, a full transliteration scheme is put in place,
>together with a markup syntax, to enable shifting from one
>to the other for a rendering.
>
>
Certainly Egyptian to Latin is far from one-to-one. Canaanite to
unpointed Hebrew is precisely one-to-one, apart from final forms. Greek
to basic Latin is not quite one-to-one, but there are long-standing
conventions, older than Unicode, for representing Greek texts in Latin
script.
>
>
> ...
>
>If the implementer deliberately created a convention for
>the representation of Greek using the Latin alphabet, and
>provided a font mapped accordingly, published his conventions,
>and encouraged you to buy his new Graecolatin Deluxe Tool,
>then yes. Although he would have a hard time getting people
>to buy into his peculiar text conventions, however.
>
>
There is no need to deliberately create a new convention or get people
to buy into it. A number of slightly inconsistent conventions for this
have been in place for very many years, some e.g. "betacode" at least
since the 1960's. There is a large community, mostly of scholars and
Bible experts rather than modern Greek speakers, who have used these
conventions for decades and continue to do so. There are several
masquerading fonts available for support of these conventions, and these
remain in widespread use. The situation is in fact similar for "visual
order" Hebrew, and for Cyrillic, Arabic, Syriac and other scripts for
which masquerading fonts are available. In fact new ones are still being
created - just last week I received a notice of a new masquerading
Hebrew font for use with a special software package designed for support
of Hebrew with masquerading fonts. Such packages are still being sold,
and actively developed I think.
Is it, I am wondering, the intention of the EU to outlaw such special
font packages? And does the alleged legislation in fact do what it is
supposed to do, or are these packages and fonts in fact 10646 conformant
although they don't use 10646 character codes for non-Latin characters?
>Nothing in the standard prevents people from using it
>to create arbitrary ciphers, nor even wackos from coming
>up with off-the-wall transliterations or worse from one
>form of text to some other form. Or from implementing
>the same by means of silly mappings in fonts. If you share
>their wacko text conventions, then you can use them
>to your heart's content, while still using the standard
>conformantly. If I want to send you Biblical texts
>represented in a Yi cipher that gets rotated on a daily
>basis, nobody is going to stop me or you from engaging
>in such silliness.
>
>
>
Ken, you are being needlessly offensive here by calling "wacko" and
"silly" what people are actually doing, what they have been doing since
before Unicode ever existed and some of them are continuing to do while
ignoring Unicode. But here you seem to confirm that these people can
continue to do what they are doing indefinitely, totally ignoring
Unicode and 10646, but their lawyers can still claim conformance to
Unicode and 10646. If that is true, it seems to me that what is "silly"
here is the Unicode conformance clauses, which are so weak as to be
meaningless.
>>And would it be acceptable to the EU?
>>
>>
>
>Rhetorical question, right?
>
>
No. I don't expect you, Ken, to be able to answer it, but maybe others
on the list who see themselves as spokespersons for the EU can hazard an
answer. What, if anything, does the EU intend to enforce? That still
seems very unclear.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.6.8 - Release Date: 03/01/2005
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 05 2005 - 11:36:29 CST