Re: Codespace Anxiety Redux (was: Re: Level of Unicode support required ...)

From: Andrew West (andrewcwest@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Nov 02 2007 - 10:17:10 CST

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    On 02/11/2007, David Starner <prosfilaes@gmail.com> wrote:
    >
    > > Agreed in the same way it took 18 years to fill up most of the BMP, it
    > > will take about 18 years to fill up plane one
    >
    > There's little in Plane 1 that anyone, even academics, really care
    > about. Today, annual non-East Asian proposals are down to about a
    > couple dozen new Latin characters and an ancient script that nobody
    > actually uses (even to transcribe stuff originally written in the
    > script). Much of the Roadmap for Plane 1 is empty, and what's left
    > often isn't really wanted by the people who work on the literature
    > written in the language (they transcribe into Latin).

    Simply not true for the scripts which I am interested in, which occupy
    a sizeable proporion of Plane 1 (see current roadmap at
    <http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/smp-5-0-5.html>).

    Taking as an example Tangut, which is roadmapped for 17 of the 256
    rows of Plane 1, transliteration is not an option. Different scholars
    use different systems of reconstructed pronunciation for Tangut
    characters, and as the Tangut script has many homophonic characters a
    reconstructed reading does not uniquely identify a single character
    anyway, so the actual characters are essential for any discussion of
    Tangut literature. I invite you to read some recent publications by
    real, living Tangut scholars to see if they use Tangut characters in
    their academic work or not:

    <http://www.amritas.com/>
    <http://www.iop.or.jp/0414/nishida.pdf>
    <http://xiang.free.fr/IATS2006.pdf>
    <http://xiang.free.fr/origine.pdf>
    <http://kepping.net/pdfs/works/Liangzhou_Bilingual_Stele.pdf>

    Oh, yes they do.

    And ditto for Jurchen (6 rows of Plane 1), and ditto for the Large
    Khitan script (18 rows of Plane 1).

    > I wouldn't be
    > surprised if the appropriate committees were disbanded (except
    > possibly for an 5 or 10 year review) long before most of what's
    > roadmapped for Plane 1 is encoded.

    I would.

    Andrew

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