RE: A question about "user areas"

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Jun 04 2010 - 11:02:51 CDT

  • Next message: Shawn Steele: "RE: A question about "user areas""

    > De : "Shawn Steele" <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>
    > A : "verdy_p@wanadoo.fr" <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>, "vanisaac@boil.afraid.org" <vanisaac@boil.afraid.org>, "unicode@unicode.org" <unicode@unicode.org>
    > Copie à :
    > Objet : RE: A question about "user areas"
    >
    > > Anyway, most existing supporters of Tengwar and Cirth (also
    > > Klingonists) still use some transliteration
    >
    > Transliterateability shouldn't be a factor, many of the scripts in Unicode have been transliterated (like Latin). Perhaps if it was only transliterated and the script was never used (but then we wouldn't have this conversation if the script was never used).

    It really IS a factor, when most users use it instead of the original
    script (this is especially true for Klingonists).

    I was not speaking about the "Transliterateability" (i.e. the
    possibility of traniterating): this is possible with almost all
    scripts, except possibly hieroglyphs, sinograms, and pictograms which
    are not really transliterated but converted according to some possible
    reading (but also dependening largely on the effective source language
    and culture, something that cannot be guessed dirctly from the script
    and requires some additional conventions).

    > And, (and I really don't want to borrow from "that other" thread, but), Emoji certainly were constructed characters (I can't even call it a constructed script) :) A difference would seem to be who is doing the adoption of the glyphs. (Teenagers vs. sci-fi/fantasy geeks, and misguided cell-phone marketers trying to get more market share vs. geeks trying to have fun). I dare suggest that many of the characters encoded in Unicode, even recently, are, in practice, used less than these 3 scripts.

    Also I've not written anything about emojis that are completely
    unrelated, and they are not in the category of a constructed language
    or script, but are additional signs that may be used in addition to
    another script, but that have no clear reading, including for their
    users (they are write-only conventions, which makes them uneligible
    for use in any humane language). Of course there may be exceptions,
    when such signs start being borrowed with an unambiguous reading in
    some language/culture, in a way that may qualify them as new letters,
    or phonograms/syllables, or words, or conventional abbreviations.

    One good example is the red heart emoji that is frequently seen on
    T-shirts and ads, in sentences like "I <heart> NYC" : you can guess
    the reading as "love" from the context, and this is also used in other
    languages like French: "J’<heart> Paris"). In such use, you will then
    frequently see that the pictogram's conventional color does not even
    matter, only the basic monochromatic glyph shape is important.

    And even if other words in the sentence use a more conventional
    script, the whole sentence can be read and understood immediately in
    lots of other languages, due to the strong meaning of the pictogram.



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