Re: Updated Phoenician proposal: confidential?

From: James Kass (jameskass@att.net)
Date: Thu Jun 03 2004 - 06:19:46 CDT

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Semitic scripts and script variants, was: Updated Phoenician proposal: confidential?"

    Peter Kirk wrote,

    > Well, I must say I found this hard to understand. I suppose he didn't
    > want to put his proposal at risk by describing how the user community
    > was, at least in part, opposed to the proposal. It is the proposer's
    > failure to give any weight to the opposition to his proposal which
    > offends me.

    Wouldn't it be the responsibility of any opposition to submit
    a counter-proposal or an alternative proposal? In that way,
    the opposition could cite any supporting evidence for their
    claims in coherence and the material could be carefully considered
    and rebutted, if appropriate.

    > >Michael Everson had responded earlier in these threads as to the
    > >reason behind the answer to the user community contact question
    > >in the proposal form. Also, the proposal itself did contain more
    > >than the single word "no" in that same field.
    >
    > Yes, it did. It contained words which I understood along the lines of:
    > "I know everything there is to know about this script, so I am simply
    > going to ignore the user community and not even ask them is they support
    > this proposal which is made in their name".

    Quoting from the proposal's response to C2a.:
    "No. Phoenician is a simple and well-known historic script used in
    a wide variety of contexts."

    It's interesting to note how people interpret things differently.
    I understood the above to mean "Phoenician is a simple and well-known
    historic script used in a wide variety of contexts". If I were revising
    this proposal, I'd simply drop the word "No" and leave the balance intact.

    > I made the point before that
    > I do not think that *ANY* new character proposal (except I suppose to
    > control type characters) should be accepted without contact and POSITIVE
    > support from its user community.

    It's agreed that proposals getting any other kind of support should
    probably be suspect. (*Winks* to those who get it.)

    > Well, this sounds like a careful circumlocution for an ad hominem
    > attack.

    No comment.

    > I suppose that if a certain person has "well-established"
    > credibility, in your sight, anyone who opposes that person is not only
    > lacking credibility but is not even to be counted among those who oppose
    > the proposal.

    Although a person's credibility often affects our bias, I try hard
    to judge a proposition on its merit rather than its proposer. Likewise
    for any argument against a proposition. However, when someone in
    the discussion often counts a group of people as "two people", even as
    more and more such people weigh-in, that suggests credibility on at
    least one issue may be lacking, which tends to make everything else
    questionable. This kind of bias seems to be a part of human nature.

    > Of course if opponents to the proposal are not counted, it
    > has unanimous support, from two people who actually know the Phoenician
    > script.

    And if "scholar" is defined as "one against a separate range for
    Phoenician", then scholars unanimously oppose the proposal.

    Best regards,

    James Kass



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