Doc number:  L2/11-342



Date: 2011-09-19

Subject: Feedback on current Old Hungarian Script in Unicode / 10646

From:   V.S. Umamaheswaran, IBM



For UTC consideration



As many of you may know, the current accepted encoding for Old

Hungarian in Unicode, is based on the ad hoc report in WG2 out of

Helsinki.  Subsequent to that a response document has been posted by

Gabor Hosszu in document http://dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4120.pdf

(L2-???).  A letter has been sent to various people similar to the

letter in document L2/11-337.



I queried within IBM on the topic with my IBM Hungarian colleagues and

received the feedback below. Based on the feedback and the strong

reaction in the letter such as in L2/11-337, this is a request for UTC

to reconsider and change the name of Old Hungarian (currently in the

pipeline) to Rovas (and change all the character names accordingly).

The feedback from my IBM Hungarian colleague is particularly clear on

the question of the name. Once a change in script and character name

is accepted, the corresponding request for change should be included

in the PDAM1.2 10646 ballot comments as US NB ballot response.



-----------------



From: IBM Hungarian terminologist and top linguistic expert Jenő

Demeczky (Jeno Demeczky/Hungary/IBM)



> From a linguistic point of view the proposals submitted by Dr. Hosszú

> are better than the former ones, and taking them into account would

> serve to advantage of the former standardization proposals.



A) The officially proposed and accepted name for the "rovás" alphabet

(Old Hungarian) is incorrect and misleading. Old Hungarian is the name

of the Hungarian language spoken in a well defined period of time,

having another kind of written form, the Latin alphabet. The "rovás"

alphabet was used in a wide time frame, and not only by Hungarian, but

by almost all Middle-Asian languages. It is definitely wrong to give

the name of a special Hungarian language variant to a kind of writing

system used by many languages through several thousand years. It is

something like if we gave the name Slavic to the Cyrillic writing.

Cyrillic writing is used in several Slavic and non Slavic languages

(such as Turkish languages in Middle-Asia), also there are Slavic

languages that use the Latin alphabet. Dr. Hosszú's proposal "Székely-

Hungarian Rovás" at least refers to a writing system and not to a

language, but it is still too narrow. In my opinion the proper name

for this alphabet should be "Rovás".



B) Both the former and the new standard proposals try to cover an

enormously wide range of time period, about 3000 years. In my opinion

it is almost impossible to include all symbols, letters and their

variants that were ever used in "Rovás". The languages used this

writing system are partly vanished, partly transformed into new

versions that could be hardly understood by their current speakers.

From that point of view Dr. Hosszú's proposals are better, because he

tries to take into account language variations and contemporary

communication needs. Still, I don't think his proposals can be assumed

as the final solution to standardize the "Rovás" alphabet.

===============