From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Apr 11 2005 - 12:22:41 CST
On 11/04/2005 16:47, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 10:09 +0100 2005-04-11, Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:
>
>> Calling by names, calling by a misleading and abusive names, calling
>> a name with intent to oppress is not acceptable.
>
>
> Sinnnaturai Srivas, ...
Please do him the courtesy of spelling his name correctly - which is
easy with copy and paste. Otherwise he might think that you are using a
misleading or abusive name with intent to oppress.
> ... stop this rhetoric right now. This is the Universal Character Set.
> It is one of our species' greatest achievements and those of us who
> are privileged to participate in contributing to its development
> recognize it as such.
Michael Everson, stop this rhetoric right now. This may be the greatest
achievement which you have played a part in, but there are plenty of
others besides which this pales into insignificance, and many of us
believe that this achievement is a seriously flawed one.
>
> Your suggestion that any one of us has "intent to oppress" the Tamil
> language or people is vile, and it is wrong, and I cannot allow it to
> pass without comment.
Sinnathurai did not mention Tamil or suggest that anyone connected with
Unicode had any "intent to oppress". There are documented cases of
characters being defined with intent to oppress (think for example of
the enforced alphabet changes in the Soviet Union), and this process may
include defining of character names.
>
> Character names once standardized CANNOT BE CHANGED. They cannot be
> changed. They cannot be changed. This is a rule of the International
> Standard.
"Unicode character names" cannot be changed. But "Unicode character
names" are not the actual names of characters or their officially
defined names, and they cannot be because they contain well known but
uncorrected errors, and because actual and official character names can
be changed and have been changed. So "Unicode character names" are
artificial and meaningless constructs. As they cannot be abolished, they
should be formally deprecated.
> ...
> We will review the text referring to this character to ensure that it
> is annotated appropriately and with sensitivity. We will not change
> the character name (because the character name CANNOT BE CHANGED).
Are you now a spokesman for the Unicode Consortium, authorised to make
pronouncements in its name?
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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