Re: Question about the directionality of "Old Hungarian" (document N3531)

From: André Szabolcs Szelp (a.sz.szelp@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 09 2008 - 07:40:05 CST

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    Ruszlán,

    There is quite some contemporary use, but mostly decorative, and confined to
    some "subcultures". Then again, within these subcultures they are also used
    for other purposes than decorative.

    I don't know what you exactly refer to, as I have seen not a single
    scholarly work dealing with it in LTR, as you claim. Though most scholarly
    work does not have editions of text useing OH _type_ anyway, rather they use
    illustrations only and at most single OH letters embedded into Latin when
    discussing them.

    Actually, when you say, you grew up there, I cannot know when you left the
    country, but popularity of the script has increased in the recent years.
    However, it is still confined, and you wouldn't expect to see it regularly
    on the streets.

    Btw. a nice combination you've got in your name: Turkic given name, Russian
    surname, both spelled in Hungarian...

    2008/11/7 Ruszlan Gaszanov <ruszlan@ather.net>

    > I grew up in Hungary and I've never seen any contemporary use of rovásírás.
    > The scholars, as far as I know, prefer LTR directionality. But than again,
    > my information is only based on my personal experience which might be
    > limited and somewhat outdated.
    >
    > In any case, as I mentioned earlier, the problem of glyph mirroring when
    > inversing default text direction does not only concern rovásírás and Old
    > Italic, but a number Phoenician-derived scripts (with both LTR and RTL
    > default directionality), so I think the bi-di algorithm needs to be
    > seriously revised to accommodate for this.
    >
    > Ruszlán
    >
    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: André Szabolcs Szelp [mailto:a.sz.szelp@gmail.com]
    > Sent: Friday, November 07, 2008 9:40 AM
    > To: Ruszlan Gaszanov
    > Cc: unicode Unicode Discussion
    > Subject: Re: Question about the directionality of "Old Hungarian" (document
    > N3531)
    >
    > No, it's written RTL 99% of the time, maybe 1% LTR. Sorry, your
    > information is flawed.
    >
    > In that it differs from Old Italic. Also, Old Italic (and Hieroglyphs)
    > are actually dead scripts used by scholars only. Old Hungarian is used
    > contemporarily.
    >
    > /Szabolcs
    >
    > 2008/11/5 Ruszlan Gaszanov <ruszlan@ather.net>:
    > >
    > >> L4. A character is depicted by a mirrored glyph if and only if
    > >> (a) the resolved directionality of that character is R, and
    > >> (b) the Bidi_Mirrored property value of that character is true.
    > >>
    > >> The Bidi_Mirrored property is defined by Section 4.7, Bidi
    > >> Mirrored-Normative of [Unicode]; the property values are specified in
    > > [UCD].
    > >> This rule can be overridden in certain cases; see HL6.
    > >
    > > From this point of view, would not it be more practical (for
    > > implementation's sake) to have the default directionality for Rovas set
    > to L
    > > and override it with RTL overrides when desired? Especially considering
    > that
    > > it is written LTR practically as often as RTL? At least, this way,
    > > implementations already developed for Old Italic and Egyptian
    > Hieroglyphics
    > > could be simply extended to Rovas.
    > >
    > > Regards,
    > >
    > > Ruszlan
    > >
    > >
    > >
    >
    >

    -- 
    Szelp, André Szabolcs
    +43 (650) 79 22 400
    


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