From: asadek@st-elias.com
Date: Thu Jul 07 2005 - 14:26:22 CDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Hudson" <tiro@tiro.com>
> Regarding additions to Uniscribe for Phoenician, I really don't
> think anyone needs to worry about this. Peter has indicated, quite
> simply, that MS doesn't implement or make announcements about
> things that are not formally part of Unicode yet. And very wise
> they are too. But I don't think there is any reason to doubt that
> Phoenician support will be implemented since, ironically, it can be
> built on top of the Hebrew shaping engine relatively easily (as was
> Thaana support).
>
This easy implementation is possible, but
1) Supporting any script costs money: committee meeting time,
chart production time, development time, testing time,
deployment time. There is no free lunch. I doubt the Phoenician
market is worth this.
2) Before Windows comes out with Phoenician support, years
will have passed and people will have used another perfectly
defensible solution: Hebrew. Will people really then feel they
should convert to the Phoenician block? Why even propose
this alternative which could disunify what works well today?
3) For Thaana (I'm learning new things every day on this list!)
there is a real requirement: a living community whose script
cannot be construed as being part of a Semitic continuum.
We come back to Phoenician is but Old Hebrew in its
appearance and sometimes its linguistic content, such texts
can be found. While no Old Thaana text may linguistically
be confused with a Phoenician text, Maldivian was never
confusable with the Phoenician language and Thaana has
apparently inherited some of its letter shapes from Divehi
Hakura, a Sinhalese-like script [Backwell encyclopedia of
Writing systems]). Thus a living community and a real need
with no valid Unicode alternative. Here the effort -- even
minimal as it was by some companies -- may have been justified
I would say (yes, I know I should not voice any opinion
on what makes economical sense or that some companies
may look at their bottom line).
Ashraf Sadek
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