From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed May 12 2004 - 00:18:33 CDT
On 11/05/2004 08:25, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 07:43 -0700 2004-05-10, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>> On 08/05/2004 08:19, Michael Everson wrote:
>>
>>> Professional Semiticists are not the only surviving cultural owners
>>> of the world's Middle Eastern historical cultural heritage.
>>
>>
>> Nor are you, Michael, or even you and your Indo-Europeanist friends.
>> So listen to the rest of us, and we will listen to you.
>
>
> I listened. I rejected the unification. I was right to do so. I have
> heard your arguments for "unifying" the two scripts in filing. I
> reject those too as being unsuitable for the default template.
>
>> But have the others agreed with his judgments because they are
>> convinced of their correctness?
>
>
> One suspects so.
>
>> Or is it more that the others have trusted the judgments of the one
>> they consider to be an expert, and have either not dared to stand up
>> to him or have simply been unqulified to do so?
>
>
> If I have a reputation for expertise it is because I have earned it,
> Mr Kirk, by years of work.
>
>> It amazes me that all of the existing scripts have apparently been
>> encoded without any properly documented justification apart from one
>> expert's unchallenged judgments.
>
>
> See http://www.evertype.com/formal.html
>
>> And these two cases are hardly a good advertisement for the expert's
>> reputation. The Coptic/Greek unification proved to be ill-advised and
>> is being undone.
>
>
> I didn't unify them. I disunified them.
>
>> As for the unified W and Q, well, I guess that if the Kurds and
>> others who use these letters in Cyrillic knew how this decision would
>> mean that their alphabet will never be sorted correctly (unless they
>> get round to tailoring their collations), they would make a strongly
>> argued case for disunification.
>
>
> A great many of the characters and scripts in the Unicode Standard
> would not be there now if we waited for the world's minorities to find
> out about the Standard and to learn about the arduous standardization
> process. Some have suggested that those minorities are fortunate to
> have an advocate at all.
>
> It is certainly not the case that the Kurds were consulted about the
> unification of two of their letters with Latin letters. It was an
> arbitrary, and in my view bad, decision taken by someone in the UTC
> long ago; it violates what I understand to be the "rules" of
> alphabetic borrowing and naturalization.
>
>> Well, perhaps the expert can feel how much his fingers have been
>> burned by over-unification and so is now pressing for everything to
>> be disunified.
>
>
> Ah.
>
> On 2004-05-02, Michael Everson wrote:
>
>>> Mr Kirk, while you seem to enjoy baiting me and going out of your
>>> way to find my "feet of clay", I didn't "fail" to do any such thing.
>>> I shall take this up on another message on this thread. In the
>>> meantime, please be advised that if you persist in this kind of
>>> discourse with me I shall be perfectly content to add you to my
>>> ignore list and say "adieu". You are welcome to consider me an
>>> arrogant bastard if you wish, but I am more interested in the work
>>> of encoding all of the scripts of the world in the Universal
>>> Character Set than in fending off pot-shots about my expertise or
>>> whether my opinion "counts".
>>
>
> Adieu, Mr Kirk.
Michael, before you add me to your ignore list please read my apology. I
based what I said above on incorrect information provided by John Cowan.
I apologise for the further misunderstanding.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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