Tengwar and Cirth (was: Re: A question about "user areas")

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Jun 02 2010 - 19:02:00 CDT

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    > I'm not sure how much longer we should continue to wait for Tengwar and
    > Cirth.

    Three words: Squeaky wheel -- grease.

    Don't expect this to "just happen". The corporate members of
    the Unicode Consortium are mostly concerned about economically
    significant sets of characters that impact their business
    (or their software processes) -- hence the major push to
    deal with the emoji set for mobile phones during the last
    couple of years.

    The academically oriented (and funded) work represented
    particularly by the Script Encoding Initiative is focussed
    on minority scripts in current use and historic scripts.
    You can see their priorities here:

    http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/

    Tengwar and Cirth are on their list, as well, but aren't
    given a high priority for encoding.

    The national bodies associated with WG2 understandably are
    focussed on scripts and other sets of characters of national
    interest to them -- hence China's work on Tangut, Jurchen,
    Old Yi, Old Hanzi, and so on.

    And the last I checked, the Elvish Nation wasn't represented
    in ISO.

    So what it would take for Tengwar and Cirth, is not to
    "continue to wait", but rather for those concerned with
    their encoding -- and y'all know who you are -- to dig
    out the proposals, update them, strengthen the documentation
    and the argumentation to deal with potential text model problems
    or other objections (including national body representatives
    who might have preconceived notions that such scripts
    are not somehow "worthy" of encoding), and then put them back in
    the hoppers and plan on pushing them on the agenda of the committees
    for a couple of years.

    That's what it takes.

    --Ken



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