Re: Fw: Endangered Alphabets [OT]

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2011 06:41:38 +0200

The SEI goal is for encoding old scripts, not much about preserving
their artistic shapes. I think that the Endangered Alphabets Project
is focusing on preserving the artistic typography of old scripts (but
not only old scripts, this also concerns modern scripts whise
evolution is oversimplifying the glyphs, or some other typographic
features, for example in Arabic).

So SEI wants to preserve the heritage of texts (how they were spelled,
their meaning, how we can perform translations, or initiate researches
about it, preserving cultural heritages that are being lost now that
oral cultures are getting forgotten). It promotes the urgent need for
enconding the characters, but with a minimum and sufficient set of
representative glyphs. This fully goes in the goal of Unicode.

The Endandered Alphabets Projects ("EAP") on the opposite focuses on
glyphs, the way characters were actually drawn (as found in
publications or in internal working documents, and in artworks), which
are not covered directly by Unicode and ISO 10646, even if the site
also speaks about scripts that are still not encoded and for which the
only way to preserve them is to keep their graphic form, before they
are completely understood and may-be later encoded.

The two projects are not duplicates, even if they may have an
intersection (a small one, IMHO). Both projects are valuable for the
more general focus of preserving the cultural heritages of humanity.
The SEI is highly technical, the EAP is highly cultural, but both are
insteresting subjects of scientific studies.

-- Philippe.

2011/9/3 Christopher Fynn <chris.fynn_at_gmail.com>:
> How does this differ from what the Script Encoding Initiative
> <http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/>  is already trying to do?
>
> Chris
Received on Fri Sep 02 2011 - 23:44:59 CDT

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