Re: ASCII and Unicode lifespan

From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Fri May 20 2005 - 08:42:12 CDT

  • Next message: Doug Ewell: "Re: ASCII and Unicode lifespan"

    Peter Kirk wrote:

    > On 20/05/2005 11:27, James Kass wrote:
    >
    >> ...
    >>
    >>> what letters are
    >>> to be considered as meaningful and what letters are pure fantasy.
    >>
    >>
    >> So far, Unicode hasn't encoded any fantasy scripts.
    >>
    >>
    >>
    > Well, Klingon has been rejected, but Deseret and Shavian have been
    > encoded although I am unaware of any non-fantasy use of these scripts,
    > and Tengwar and Cirth, which are certainly fantasy scripts, are
    > roadmapped.
    >
    Does "fantasy" refer only to the creation of the script, or its use?
    There has been poetry and such written in Tengwar, and there are blogs
    in Klingon pIqaD. Conversely, Shavian was never intended as a fantasy
    script, but I don't know how much was ever done with it. But weren't
    there newspapers printed in Deseret? That's hardly fantasy use. And
    there's Visible Speech, not yet in Unicode (I'm working on it), which
    was used in education and also in scholarly journals.

    > But I think Alexander's point was more that some individual fantasy
    > characters have been encoded, i.e. characters for which there is no
    > proper evidence of use as distinct characters. His contribution to
    > this list is upper case Glagolitic.
    >
    I thought someone else cited evidence from a scholar in Glagolitic that
    uppercase characters *did* exist. This then reduces to an internal
    dispute among Glagolitic students, not subject to our resolution (and
    Unicode does, of necessity, tend to favor the "more characters" over the
    "less characters" camp in such disputes, as we've seen already).

    > I am sure that others can make other suggestions. I expect that every
    > case will be debatable, but I am sure that at least a few characters
    > have crept in which in fact should never have been encoded - even if
    > we don't count those which have canonical decompositions like the
    > presentation forms.
    >
    That's probably true, but then "at least a few" errors, even howling
    gaffes, is likely pretty good for a standard of Unicode's size.

    This thread has become really stunningly unproductive.

    ~mark



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