Re: Unifon

From: Jean-François Colson <jf_at_colson.eu>
Date: Wed, 30 May 2012 04:59:37 +0200

Le 29/05/12 06:57, Benjamin M Scarborough a écrit :
> 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
>
>
Unification is a good idea while you use only the capital Unifon. But it
seems cased Unifon has lowercase letters which look like small capitals
and therefore, in my opinion, the unification with Latin would only
provide a partial solution: every texts in Unifon which contain
lowercase letters should be marked as small caps or special fonts would
be used.
I think the best way to encode Unifon would be as a new script, in SMP.
After all, in the 1,114,112-code-point era, is it so important to save
50 code-points with a weird unification?

Another possibility, if the unification is chosen, would be to add a
variation selector to each Unifon letter to express that the lowercase
letters are different. Would that be possible?

JF
Received on Tue May 29 2012 - 22:04:03 CDT

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