Re: Mayan numerals

Jameson, Michael, et al -

OK, I'm going to join in here before this goes much further. (And as
usual on this list I'm writing as an individual, and this is only my
personal opinion.)

You are always welcome to put forward a proposal for whatever you want
to see encoded. I'm happy to receive serious proposals, and in my
experience, the committee is generally happy to look at them.

But when you ask the question and make the observations below, my simple
answer would be that you don't see any problem because you haven't been
sitting in the character encoding committees for 20+ years to observe
how things "gang aft agley" as they say.

In my opinion, the UTC would be irresponsible to approve the encoding
for a set of digits for a complicated system like Mayan without even
having a preliminary script proposal on record; and without any
involvement of the actual serious scholars in the field.

No matter what you say about how safe it is, well... I wouldn't tend to
believe that without firm evidence, which means -- at least -- someone
having done significant work on the whole script in the context of a
character encoding proposal to prove it. And given a lot of the other
questions and speculation in your recent e-mail, I'm inclined to think
that yes, you aren't an expert and probably don't have enough clear
answers to detailed questions, as required to convince a committee.

In any case: you're welcome to write up a proposal for Mayan digits and
give your opinions and findings. It would not be a waste of time to do
so. But I would expect the outcome to be that the committee would set it
aside and eventually pass it along to the scholars who end up working on
the actual proposal for the Mayan script. At that time, it would be a
valuable input document.

Cheers,
     Rick

-------

On 8/23/2012 10:33 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>
> Because we aren't ready to do it without doing it in the context
> of the whole script.
>
>
> Why not? Can you give some indication of what you're afraid of, some
> scenario of how we could possibly later regret having included the
> basic digits now?
>
> I understand you may be reluctant to speculate, but I really don't see
> how it could be a problem.
Received on Thu Aug 23 2012 - 13:52:25 CDT