From: George W Gerrity (g.gerrity@gwg-associates.com.au)
Date: Sat Jun 23 2007 - 01:45:33 CDT
Thank you, Asmus. You have summarised my position exactly. Pity I
also answered in in a long-winded way before I read yours.
George
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On 2007-06-23, at 15:00, Asmus Freytag wrote:
> On 6/22/2007 9:20 PM, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:
>> OK...now that we're getting closer to list topic...
>> [...]
>>
>>> Even if these ancients did have a separate set of symbols for
>>> base 60, say, we have no need of them.
>>
>> On this I could not disagree with you more, particularly if there
>> is a scholarly community studying these texts.
>>
> If there is an existing set of symbols in use by some community,
> that would be worthy of investigation for encoding. George makes
> that point that the (modern) community does not use such symbols to
> discuss the concepts in the old texts. Where symbols exist in the
> old texts themselves, they are worthy of investigation for encoding
> in their own right - and I suspect for the scripts in question,
> that is being done / has been done as part of the task of encoding
> these ancient scripts.
>>> I have an article somewhere that discusses computations and
>>> computational algorithms used by the ancients, even translating
>>> the source text into English, with illustrations of the
>>> computations involved. The author of this article found no need
>>> to use symbols other than 0–9 to talk about the computations.
>>
>> Sure. But (again assuming that these symbols exist as
>> hypothesized) that is at best a transliteration. Your argument --
>> if I understand it correctly -- is similar to saying that because
>> we can represent Bengali unambiguously in Roman transliteration,
>> we don't need to encode Bengali script in Unicode.
> No, his argument is, that for purposes of discussing these
> concepts, the modern community uses modern symbols and therefore
> there is no need to hypothesize. Looking at what "might" be is not
> useful - it is much more practical to research what is, and then
> one can start to worry about whether and how this translates into
> new character codes.
>
> A./
>
------
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