Unifon (was: Re: Unicode 6.2 to Support the Turkish Lira Sign)

On May 28, 2012, at 01:52, Michael Everson wrote:
> There are many blorts. I've discovered some working with Unifon. I haven't exactly had much support from the UTC with what I've discovered. I've found the usual posturing about possible unifications with other scripts.
>
> I went in saying, well, we could do this like Lisu, which none of you will like. And that was true eniough. So I did it the unification way as was agreeed one UTC, but then I get push-back about the encoding model and isn't the script dead and more of that.

Dead script? Wasn't it still seeing use in the 1980:s? And why would being a dead script be a problem? The UCS is full of characters with little to no contemporary use (at least not for authoring new documents). Sure, if this was still the era when we were limited to 65,536 code points, it would be a big concern, but this is the 1,114,112-code-point era. There is plenty of space.

Maybe you should propose the characters for the SMP. It worked for Deseret, right? And last I saw Deseret's useful lifespan ended before 1900. I bet even the English Phonotypic Alphabet would get accepted if it were proposed for the SMP instead of the BMP. You could call the block "Latin Extended-F," since there are plenty of letters left in that series.

And I think unifying Unifon with Latin is a good idea. In Unifon I see ABȻDEFGHIJKLMNOPRSTUVWYƵ all being used in familiar ways that don't seem at all unusual for a Latin-based script.

But that's just me.

—Ben Scarborough
Received on Tue May 29 2012 - 00:03:51 CDT