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. ===============