rick@unicode.org scripsit:
> Shavian and Deseret are examples of
> scripts that needn't have been encoded now, and aren't very widely used, and
> aren't _NEEDED_ by anyone at all, but were encoded because a while back
> someone just happened to have done the work, and the proposals have just been
> sitting around gathering dust. Might as well get them in, because nothing
> more needs to be done to the proposals.
I think that talking of _NEED_ quickly gets you into trouble. Why do people
NEED to use their native script on computers at all? Given all the other
things they have to learn, learning a romanization of it should be no sweat.
Every educated person in Greece, e.g., knows the Latin alphabet and can apply
it to Greek text, so there is no NEED to encode Greek at all.
Instead, we should look at what people WANT to use. People WANT to use
hieroglyphics for Egyptian text, Gothic for Gothic text, rovasiras or
ogham for pseudo-secret communications. Therefore these scripts
should go in, given that there are enthusiasts who will do the work.
> What's "bad" is that work seems to get done on fictional scripts while there
> are still millions of real people (some of whom even have access to
> computers) who can't express texts of their natively-used languages with
> Unicode because we don't have their scripts encoded. There are various
> reasons for that, the most common being that we can't get enough information
> about them. The most common reason for not having enough information is that
> we can't shlep enough experts to us, nor shlep enough of us to the experts,
> to complete any encoding proposals... a matter of time and funds.
Just so, which means that the energy spent on invented scripts is nowise
taken away from the energy that could be spent on obscure-but-real scripts.
Would that it were otherwise.
-- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore --Douglas Hofstadter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 13:48:07 EDT