RE: Old Hebrew, extra Uniscribe work (Re: Arabic encoding model (alas, static!))

From: asadek@st-elias.com
Date: Thu Jul 07 2005 - 12:28:29 CDT

  • Next message: Peter Constable: "RE: Old Hebrew, extra Uniscribe work (Re: Arabic encoding model (alas, static!))"

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Peter Constable" <petercon@microsoft.com>

    > The fact that old Turkish is written in Arabic while recent Turkish is
    > written in Latin has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Arabic and
    > Latin should be encoded with the same or different characters.

    If this is taboo, don't tempt me: it was clear, if a single font substitution
    works to write Phoenician and Hebrew, as it is done today, that they
    share much more than Arabic and Latin!

    Really not very convincing.

    > You should not be making generic assumptions about what software vendors
    > will do,

    I need to ask someone's permission? To how many people in how many
    companies? Do you decide for Microsoft?

    > let alone draw conclusions about what is or isn't worth UTC
    > doing based on those assumptions.

    Well, of course, individual companies may make non profitable decisions, I
    doubt this will be a general trend and thus the support will be scanty, not
    a good thing for an interchange standard.

    Sorry, but I do believe (apparently one has to express regret for musing
    about the need for support) the encoding of Phoenician and especially
    its implementation makes probably very little economical sense.

    > Also, note that some issues, such as default sorting, may need to be
    > considered by a major software vendor regardless of what other plans
    > they may have to support a script.

    Well, certainly no default sorting plan is needed if the script is not even
    encoded!

    This precisely my point...these additional plans take time for a very marginal
    need which already has a solution.

    Again, if this is taboo, let's leave it at that.

    Ashraf Sadek

    (Loved your combining mark stacking, just proves what can be done and that
    diacritic placement seems not the insuperable problem M. Whistler alluded to in
    the Arabic case, he may be right -- a well researched document may have
    proved that it is indeed an insuperable one, but as he said there is none.)



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