From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Dec 23 2003 - 19:40:03 EST
Michael Everson wrote:
> Of course, to echo the observation John Hudson made regarding the
> Masonic Hebrew and Samaritan text, the text presented here
> http://www.crowndiamond.org/cd/genesis.html shows that Palaeo-Hebrew
> should obviously unified with Latin.
Instead of taking dogmatic positions on how proto-semitics scripts
should be encoded, why not leaving this work to the people that
will really use these scripts and are currently working with
those texts and publishing them? It seems that there are much
enough people working there without needing to oppose to all
what they have to say.
Could you instead take the time to work on the missing Latin
letters for African languages? Why isn't there any serious
work about these living languages that don't have lot of
universitary support and nearly no computer resources in
Africa to make this job?
There are lots of work there to work with specifications,
work with simple 8-bit encodings that could be mapped easily to
Unicode and usable on low-cost computers, and some agreements
to seek with these African communities so that they will finally
get keyboards, fonts and applications that will fit their urgent
need for litteracy support in poor country (producing books for
these languages is too much expensive in those poor countries,
and they need a way to automate this to allow developping
education in those countries, as well as acess to culture
in their language, with translations of their work).
These millions of African people merit respect even if their
culture is not aided by their government which sometimes refuses
any help to develop native languages face to official ones (like
French, English, Arabic).
You get people learn happily other cultures if they are not
offered first the legitimate right to learn and use their own
culture, i.e. their native languages and scripts.
In many cases, African languages would be better served if the
Latin characters needed for their languages were added and
specified in accurate lists, so that systems could be developped
to use and interchange these languages, and fonts could be
augmented by typographers like you with the support of the missing
few glyphs.
There is still interesting work to do within the Latin and
Arabic scripts. It's a shame that someone like you invest so
much in an area that would better be specified by other
communities. You can keep your right of criticizing their
work, or specify some formalism if you need it. But please avoid
dogmatic attitutes, simply because people in this list do not
have the same formalism as the one you created.
Thanks.
Philippe.
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