L2/08-311

To: UTC
From: Deborah Anderson, Script Encoding Initiative
Date: 10 August 2008
RE: Feedback on Revised Nushu Proposal L2/08-302 (N3463)

1. General comments
Richard Cook reviewed the proposal in early August 2008 and sent the
following short report. (He will do additional checking against print
sources, particularly Chiang's book, before the WG2 meeting.)

"The proposal seems much improved, and addresses all of the questions raised
[in document L2/07-300]. I'm not sure I understand all the points made in
the appendices, but I'm also not sure I need to understand them all. On the
whole, I'm satisfied that the authors understand unification principles, and
have prepared a solid proposal. 

It's not clear to me if there might in fact be other candidates for future
encoding: they seem to suggest there might be, but failure to address this
question needn't be an impediment to encoding. Future extensions are
perfectly acceptable. 

I still need to do some careful checking of the glyphs against available
print sources. But I'm not expecting any problems. The character set is not
really so big in Chinese terms. It seems very well defined, and no obvious
problems in the multi-column chart. One thing to consider: they might raise
the issue of possibly using Variation Selectors for future problematic
cases, e.g. widely divergent 'allographs'."

2. Other Comments: Naming
The naming conventions need revision. Currently the authors have added "A"
"B" "C" "D", even "E" to variants that otherwise have the same basic
readings. But what that means is that all of the names look strange, and
some of them, such as "YIA" are ambiguous. Is that "YIA" or is it
"YI-variantA"? Is "YID" meant as "YID"
or is it "YI-variantD", etc.

At the very least, they need to update sets like:

SYEA
SYEB
SYEC
SYED
SYEE

to

SYE-A or SYE1 or SYE-1

etc.