Re: Mandombe

From: Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com>
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2012 23:35:47 +0100

On 9 Jun 2012, at 23:09, Asmus Freytag wrote:

>> And in so saying, I'd like to see a shopping list, hastily written. Notes taken at speed in class. Personal signatures.
>>
> Practicality doesn't enter.

Yes, it does, O wise and axiomatic Asmus.

> If there's evidence of significant usage, then that should suffice. I don't care whether there are shopping lists.

I do. I don't think that this thing as designed is stable, and if we encode it on spec now before users modify it we will be in for revisiting things later. Unless it can be shown that this is actually practical and usable, it won't have had enough track-record to get encoded.

So far, it is a conscript for a natural language. I haven't seen evidence that it is more.

> If someone publishes books in that script, for example, and can point to significant sales - that's use.

There's my Nyctographic Alice. There's a whole rake of Japanese scripts.

> The reason for encoding is to allow digitization of texts - and the reason for *standardization* of this encoding is that text are shared by a significant user community whether concurrently (as in living scripts) or asynchronously (as in dead scripts).

Try to remember that I know this, Asmus.

> Shopping lists or handwritten class notes still don't enter, unless they lead to digital documents.

The whole structure of this writing system appears to be too complex for people to use at speed. If they can't use it at speed, then either they will give it up, or they will modify it, and it, like Bamum and others, will evolve into something that *is* practical.

This is definitely a go-slow script, precisely because it is clearly not very practical.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Received on Sat Jun 09 2012 - 17:37:38 CDT

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