Re: Letter from the Hungarian Standards Institution

Dear Gábor,
thank you for your letter regarding ISO/IEC 10646/PDAM 1.2 - Amendment 1.

You asked me to arrange for a German negative vote on that document,
based on your concerns regarding the script called "Old Hungarian" in
that document.

Please understand the position of the German NB, as expressed in
WG2 N4085:

1.) The script, as any other script, is part of the cultural
    inheritance of the whole humankind. Nobody "owns" it.
    The German NB therefore independently requests to encode it
    like other scripts, by whatever name.
2.) The German NB is neutral about the name by which the script is
    referenced in the standard, as such a name is not more than a
    label by which the script can be uniquely identified.
3.) The German NB acknowledges the analysis (WG2 N4064) of the
    existing proposals (WG2 N3697, WG2 N4007), which show that
    there is a large subset of characters agreed by all experts.
    The German NB requests the encoding of these characters.
4.) The German NB also requests the encoding of characters which
    obviously are in use, and which cannot be considered as glyph
    variants or sequences of other encoded or proposed characters.
5.) The German NB is open to any compromises regarding the name of
    the script or individual characters, or to the addition of
    further characters.

This position of the German NB was perfectly matched by the Helsinki
meeting, as documented in WG2 N4110.

Thus, Germany will insist of the inclusion of the script in ISO/IEC
10646/PDAM 1.2 and its successor documents, and will oppose any requests
to delay the encoding of the script further.

However, Germany will not oppose any name changes or character
additions which will be agreed upon by the experts in the further
progressing on ISO/IEC 10646/PDAM 1.2.

(As this is a general clarification, I publish this answer on the
 Unicode mailing list.)

Best wishes
Karl
Received on Wed Sep 14 2011 - 03:45:54 CDT