Re: Terms constructed script, invented script (was: FW: Re: Shavian)
7 Jul 2001 11:01:18 GMT, Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk [EMAIL PROTECTED] pisze:
I put a sample at http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/vi-001.gif
Now I put a prettier version there: with variable line width, serifs,
and by a slightly improved sizing engine (enlargement of rounded parts
to make them look the same size as straight parts happens locally
instead of only at the top and bottom of a letter), and with all
dots looking exactly the same due to rounding coordinates of their
centers to whole pixels (or whole pixels and a half, in case of an
even dot size).
I still can't have serifs on ends of slanted lines, but they happen
only in ASCII shapes, not in my script, so I'm not sure that I want
them badly enough. Serifs are really triangles, so they look like
traditional serifs only in small pixel sizes like that one.
It would be nice to be able to draw it with TeX, but I don't know
TeX well enough. I will not reimplement the whole Metafont myself
either:-)
--
__(" Marcin Kowalczyk * [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/
\__/
^^ SYGNATURA ZASTPCZA
QRCZAK
RE: Terms constructed script, invented script (was: FW: Re: Shavian)
From: Edward Cherlin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] The 'tsu' sign in reduced form is traditionally used in Japanese for consonant doubling (chyotto is written chi yo tsu to), but has been adapted for glottal stops at the end of words. Odd. I've always considered Japanese double consonants to be glottal stops. Could anyone please explain the difference? Thanks, /|/|ike
RE: Terms constructed script, invented script (was: FW: Re: Shavian)
Odd. I've always considered Japanese "double consonants" to be glottal stops. Could anyone please explain the difference? They are glottal stops. But Japanese writing doesn't have a (standard) means of expressing a glottally stopped vowel pair. It only can express consonants. One supposes that a small "tsu" would suffice, e.g. $B%O%t%!%$%C%$(B = hawai'i... And probably has already been used somewhere to that effect. As Ed Cherlin pointed out, "tsu" has been adapted for word-final consonants... in that sense, "tsu" is effectively used as a virama already. I still don't know if there's any Japanese phonetic scholarship that distinguishes "L" and "R"... Rick
Re: Terms constructed script, invented script (was: FW: Re: Shavian)
In a message dated 2001-07-06 0:31:39 Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I wonder: why aren't languages with simple syllabic structures written in hiragana? It seems to be built for them. Hiragana (and katakana) assume certain things about the syllabic structure, specifically that syllables are of the form [C] V [C], where the trailing consonant (if any) must be n. Pairs of consonants like st and tr within a single syllable aren't supported in kana. Neither are consonants like th and vowels like short a as in ash. The kana are not built for languages with simple syllabic structures in general, but for a specific language of that type: Japanese. It serves that language very well, but would not work so well for, say, Spanish or Italian (which could also be said to have relatively simple syllabic structures). 11 later wrote: Latin letters were not invented at any one time, they evolved, sort of. Same with our European digits. That's an interesting point. As we have been saying, all scripts are created by humans; none are natural in the sense that they sprout from the ground or wash up on the shore. But is there a difference, in some people's minds at least, between a script that is invented more or less intact versus one that evolves over time? Does this kind of evolution somehow add credibility to a script? What about Cyrillic; isn't it pretty much the same as when it was introduced? -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
Re: Terms constructed script, invented script (was: FW: Re: Shavian)
In a message dated 2001-07-06 0:31:39 Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I wonder: why aren't languages with simple syllabic structures written in hiragana? It seems to be built for them. I am using my own script inspired by hiragana 10 years ago for writing Polish. It looks very differently, I only liked the idea of having letters for consonant+vowel pairs and stretched it a bit. I put a sample at http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/vi-001.gif (resolution suitable for printing at 300dpi). For example the subject says: Re: vi (Re: O wyższości znaku zachęty nad GUI), i.e. Re: vi (Re: About the superiority of command-line prompt over GUI), which has only 11 letters between the second Re: and GUI. I won't dare proposing to encode it in Unicode. The number of users is approaching two. But technically it's an interesting script with a non-trivial rendering engine. I implemented the rendering engine and a translator from standard Polish orthography (not perfect due to ambiguities in our orthography - I modified the orthography a little to resolve them). I did it to practice reading. I could only practice writing before - it's hard to read what you just wrote, because you remember what you wrote! Letters are composed from core characters by the engine. There are 35 consonants, 8 normal vowels, 1 extra vowel, joiner, and non-joiner. They produce an unbounded number of letters. (1) Adjacent consonants are joined up to some limit (2 is a good choice, but there is no semantic difference here) and they are joined with the following vowel if present (this is mandatory). (2) A consonant+vowel pair must be split if this is a border between a prefix and a stem or the like. Such pairs are also split in some foreign words to force correct pronunciation (pronunciation of a consonant sometimes depends on the following vowel and vice versa). Non-joiner is used to encode such splitting in the stream of core characters. (3) The default (greedy) splitting of chunks of consonants is not always perfect, e.g. when it would join a final part of a prefix with the beginning of the stem. Joiner and non-joiner are used to prevent or force splitting at certain points between consonants. Forced joining overrides the limit of joined consonants. (4) Any two letters can be joined by writing one above another with a dot between. This is never required by the orthography but is sometimes a good style, e.g. in the od prefix and in diphtongs. Joiner is used to encode that. Finally there are cases where a consonant+vowel pair is split according to (2) and then joined according to (4). I am encoding such case with joiner + non-joiner + joiner. I think that there is already a similar practice in Unicode used for Arabic ligatures. Actually I'm not using even PUA characters but an ASCII-based escaping scheme, because I don't have an editor capable of editing text in such a script. But simple non-joined letters put in a font with the ability to directly edit joiners and non-joiners would be technically workable. The meaning of a text file would then be unambiguous modulo PUA assignment (the ASCII-based escaping is a hack). -- __( Marcin Kowalczyk * [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/ \__/ ^^ SYGNATURA ZASTĘPCZA QRCZAK
Re: Shavian
At 01:25 -0400 2001-07-07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Furthermore, the Tengwar and the Cirth have been used and are being used to write English as well as JRRT's invented languages, and in such a way that (unlike Pigpen, e.g.) they cannot be taken as mere ciphers. Very true. How did these usages develop? Are they mentioned in Tolkien's manuscripts, or did they develop later? The text on the title page of the Lord of the Rings is written (by Tolkien) in English in both Tengwar and Cirth. -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian
At 13:19 -0700 2001-07-06, Kenneth Whistler wrote: Aha! I see you are more of a true believer than the true believers. So your problem is that the *wrong* group is claiming jurisdiction here, and you would prefer to wait for the Númenoreans to show up in person at WG2 before progressing any Tengwar proposal. Perhaps I'll go to a ring of standing stones during the next eclipse and call some hither. Or perhaps they will just name Ireland as proxy. Lots of other minorities have :-) -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian
At 12:25 -0700 2001-07-06, Michael \(michka\) Kaplan wrote: While fully recognizing the importance of Middle Earth to some people it is difficult for me to get past the fact that there Middle Earth has no national representative to WG2? Neither did Old Italic, which was sponsored by Ireland and the Unicode Consortium. Not, you know, Italy. And the same people who push so hard for these scripts may never know why it is so hard to find experts for other scripts who are willing to help. Perhaps those experts just did not want their scripts to be given equal footing with those of the _Elvish Linguistic Fellowship_ or similar organizations? Michka, the only thing I can say is nonsense. You've given no evidence whatsoever that any particular group eschewed Unicode because it had scripts in it they didn't like. Some members of WG2 complained that there were too many minority scripts roadmapped, to which only one answer could be given: be happy that your script needs are met, and remember that others' rights to their scripts are just as important as yours. The UCS is, indeed, intended to be Universal, and there's no getting around that. Sometimes it's hard to find Nabataean experts because there aren't very many, and a lot of traditional philologists don't use e-mail. Sometimes the real experts are dead (like Lytkin, who published definitively on Old Permic). I can't think of a case where anyone said, oh, we can't bother with Unicode because they plan to encode Tengwar. You can just call me a consciencious objector to having anyone who subscribes to Vinyar Tengwar considering themselves to be among the Númenoreans (a.k.a. the Dúnedain), who alone of all the races of Men knew Elvish tongues. :-) Most subscribers think of themselves as linguists interested in having a bit of fun. -- Michael Everson
Re: Terms constructed script, invented script (was: FW: Re: Shavian)
In a message dated 2001-07-07 9:30:56 Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Cherokee is another syllabary that is very language-specific. And Etruscan was pretty much forced into an alphabet--with its long consonant clusters, a syllabary would have been unwieldy. Another example is Canadian Syllabics. VERY difficult to write English using that script. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
Re: Terms constructed script, invented script (was: FW: Re: Shavian)
Hiragana (and katakana) assume certain things about the syllabic structure, specifically that syllables are of the form [C] V [C], where the trailing consonant (if any) must be "n". Yes, but, kana _has_ been used even natively in comics and so forth, to end words with other consonants (i.e., eliding the last vowel) for example: $B%$%s%9%?%s%H%C!&%9!<%W%C(B The biggest problem with using kana for a wide variety of languages, aside from having a severely limited number of consonants vowels even with extension, is that it doesn't express adjacent non-identical consonants at all. Kana should be quite adequate for some other languages... Hawaiian? Oh, hmmm, well, except for that darned L/R distinction which kana doesn't have... Uh... Never mind... Rick
Re: Terms constructed script,invented script (was: FW: Re: Shavian)
At 12:20 PM 2001-07-07, Michael Everson wrote: At 11:16 -0700 2001-07-07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Kana should be quite adequate for some other languages... Hawaiian? Oh, hmmm, well, except for that darned L/R distinction which kana doesn't have... Neither does Hawai'ian. So then all you need is a kana rendering for a glottal stop-vowel syllable, like 'i in hava'i or 'a in a'a (a type of lava). Based on the manga I have seen, the most likely combination is the small 'tsu' followed by a vowel. The 'tsu' sign in reduced form is traditionally used in Japanese for consonant doubling (chyotto is written chi yo tsu to), but has been adapted for glottal stops at the end of words. If anyone cares, that is. -- Michael Everson Edward Cherlin Generalist A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it. Alice in Wonderland
Re: Shavian
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] What's bad is that work seems to get done on fictional scripts while there are still millions of real people (some of whom even have access to computers) who can't express texts of their natively-used languages with Unicode because we don't have their scripts encoded. This is (I think) one large reason for the contention -- a combination of the reaction of people who argue against fictional scripts due to what they fear will be the appearance of the above, and of course the people who actually do not like the appearance. Can we truly blame them? The most common reason for not having enough information is that we can't shlep enough experts to us, nor shlep enough of us to the experts, to complete any encoding proposals... a matter of time and funds. It is even quite likely that work on fictional scripts can even serve to undermine attempts to get alternate funding to assist with the difficulties you cite here. Example: I do not think I would find fault in the character of an organization or individual that would choose not to assist in the work to encode Egyptian Hieroglyphics if they saw their script in the same consideration list as something like Klingon. The only valid justification I have seen for encoding scripts like Desert is the one from John Jenkins: The problem was, a vicious circle quickly arose. Nobody started to implement surrogates because there were no characters encoded using them, and nobody wanted their characters to be encoded using surrogates because nobody was implementing them. To break the vicious circle, we needed a writing system which was at once real and at the same time so incredibly rare and/or dead that nobody would object to its being encoded with surrogates. I volunteered the Deseret Alphabet as such as script, and it was quickly accepted. Well, now with the strength of tens of thousands of new characters that *are* important to a large number of people, this argument cannot really be applied to fictional scripts as effectively. No one needs Tengwar or Cirth (or Shavian!) to make people believe that surrogates need to be supported, if indeed they ever truly did. MichKa Michael Kaplan Trigeminal Software, Inc. http://www.trigeminal.com/
Re: Shavian
[EMAIL PROTECTED] scripsit: Shavian and Deseret are examples of scripts that needn't have been encoded now, and aren't very widely used, and aren't _NEEDED_ by anyone at all, but were encoded because a while back someone just happened to have done the work, and the proposals have just been sitting around gathering dust. Might as well get them in, because nothing more needs to be done to the proposals. I think that talking of _NEED_ quickly gets you into trouble. Why do people NEED to use their native script on computers at all? Given all the other things they have to learn, learning a romanization of it should be no sweat. Every educated person in Greece, e.g., knows the Latin alphabet and can apply it to Greek text, so there is no NEED to encode Greek at all. Instead, we should look at what people WANT to use. People WANT to use hieroglyphics for Egyptian text, Gothic for Gothic text, rovasiras or ogham for pseudo-secret communications. Therefore these scripts should go in, given that there are enthusiasts who will do the work. What's bad is that work seems to get done on fictional scripts while there are still millions of real people (some of whom even have access to computers) who can't express texts of their natively-used languages with Unicode because we don't have their scripts encoded. There are various reasons for that, the most common being that we can't get enough information about them. The most common reason for not having enough information is that we can't shlep enough experts to us, nor shlep enough of us to the experts, to complete any encoding proposals... a matter of time and funds. Just so, which means that the energy spent on invented scripts is nowise taken away from the energy that could be spent on obscure-but-real scripts. Would that it were otherwise. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore --Douglas Hofstadter
Re: Shavian
In a message dated 2001-07-05 21:02:05 Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: A lot of the arguments against Klingon weren't specificially against Klingon; they were more against any fictional scripts in Unicode. The editorial response to comments from national groups, in the public archive of ISO 10646 stuff that you linked to at the start of this message, included a complaint about Deseret from the German Standards body, in that it was inappropriate for being a fictional script. The response to that was bascially Not really, IIRC. That does not bode well for lack of contention for later scripts. I do feel that there is a difference between: (a) scripts like Shavian and Deseret, which were invented in a completely serious vein, in an attempt to provide an alternative and presumably better means of writing a real language, but didn't quite catch on; and (b) truly fictional scripts like Klingon, Tengwar, Cirth, and such that appear in novels or TV or movies and were never intended to be used seriously. Both G.B. Shaw and the Mormons had genuine, if not universally shared, reasons for wanting to abandon the Latin script for writing English in favor of something better. Shaw thought English literacy could be improved with a more regular writing system to take the place of the convoluted Latin-based orthography. (There are also rumors of darker motives, but the intent was still for serious use.) Brigham Young wanted to isolate the Mormons from the rest of the corrupt world of written English. Compare the motivations behind these scripts to that of scripts that appear in fictional literature and popular culture. Although nobody denies the greatness of J.R.R. Tolkein as an author and scholar, it is extremely unlikely that he intended the beautiful and carefully designed Tengwar and Cirth scripts to be used by real humans to write real languages for use in everyday life. Nor did Marc Okrand and other creators of Star Trek likely intend the Klingon script and/or language to be used seriously, in the same sense as Shaw or Young. This goes double for some of the other scripts listed in the ConScript registry. Some appear *only* on the author's Web pages, alongside elaborate descriptions of fantasy worlds. I do believe that original intent has something to do with the legitimacy of a script for consideration in Unicode. Remember that all scripts, including Latin, Arabic, Han, Shavian, and Klingon, were invented by humans. There are differences having to do with how long ago, by whom, for what purpose, and how widely adopted, but there is no such thing as a natural script against which artificial scripts may be contrasted. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
Re: Shavian
From: John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Just so, which means that the energy spent on invented scripts is nowise taken away from the energy that could be spent on obscure-but-real scripts. Would that it were otherwise. No one is arguing the FACTUAL basis for the above, but it is quite reasonable to argue the perception, and its effect on credibility. Especially if the desire is to inspire more wallets to be opened and help with the effort to encode these historical scripts? MichKa Michael Kaplan Trigeminal Software, Inc. http://www.trigeminal.com/
Terms constructed script, invented script (was: FW: Re: Shavian)
$B$i$s$^(B $B!z$8$e$&$$$C$A$c$s!z(B $B!!!_$"$+$M(B $B!
Re: Shavian
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Shavian and Deseret are examples of scripts that needn't have been encoded now, and aren't very widely used, and aren't _NEEDED_ by anyone at all, but were encoded because a while back someone just happened to have done the work, and the proposals have just been sitting around gathering dust. Shavian, at least, has a body of users that are ready and willing to use Unicode. I have never seen or heard of actual use of Unicode for Cherokee (and I have done some browsing of the appropriate sites and a little talking to users); after sticking Shavian in a web search early today, I've seen several examples of Unicode being used for Shavian (Conscript encoding), and several comments about being prepared to switch to a real Unicode encoding. What's bad is that work seems to get done on fictional scripts while there Really? There's only one fictional script encoded, and one on the fast track to encoding. Both those are simple non-shaping, non-combining LTR scripts with a very well defined closed set of characters. It probably only took an afternoon to write up either of them. I think that more effort has been wasted debating fictional scripts on [EMAIL PROTECTED] than it will take to get them encoded. There are various reasons for that, the most common being that we can't get enough information about them. The most common reason for not having enough information is that we can't shlep enough experts to us, nor shlep enough of us to the experts, to complete any encoding proposals... a matter of time and funds. How does encoding fictional scripts affect this one way or another? -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Shavian
From: Michael (michka) Kaplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Example: I do not think I would find fault in the character of an organization or individual that would choose not to assist in the work to encode Egyptian Hieroglyphics if they saw their script in the same consideration list as something like Klingon. Could you find fault with some one who chose not to work with Cham because it was in the same consideration list as the (dead) Egyptian Hieroglyphics? -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Shavian
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I do feel that there is a difference between: (a) scripts like Shavian and Deseret, which were invented in a completely serious vein, in an attempt to provide an alternative and presumably better means of writing a real language, but didn't quite catch on; and (b) truly fictional scripts like Klingon, Tengwar, Cirth, and such that appear in novels or TV or movies and were never intended to be used seriously. I agree. The first are monuments to men's ego, like the great statue to Ozymandius, failed attempts to improve the world by fiat. The second are monuments to men's greatness, offerings of joy and entertainment to the world, offerings that were gladly accepted, offerings that actually improved the world. I do believe that original intent has something to do with the legitimacy of a script for consideration in Unicode. Why? IMO, characters and scripts should be encoded based on whether people are actually using them today, and will actually be using them tomorrow. (Roughly the same principle as not [...] idiosyncratic, personal, novel, rarely exchanged, or private-use characters, nor [...] logos or graphics.) There are a lot of political reasons why some characters or scripts shouldn't be encoded - they shouldn't matter. -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Shavian
Doug Ewell wrote: Both G.B. Shaw and the Mormons had genuine, if not universally shared, reasons for wanting to abandon the Latin script for writing English in favor of something better. Shaw thought English literacy could be improved with a more regular writing system to take the place of the convoluted Latin-based orthography. (There are also rumors of darker motives, but the intent was still for serious use.) Brigham Young wanted to isolate the Mormons from the rest of the corrupt world of written English. The intent of the Deseret alphabet may have had more to do with promoting literacy. The vagaries of English spelling were possibly perceived as too much of a burden for recent European immigrants when combined with the hardship of learning spoken English. At the time the Deseret script was being promoted, the Saints were pretty much geographically isolated from most of the Gentiles, so censorship wouldn't have been much of a problem. Best regards, James Kass.
Re: Shavian
At 03:03 -0400 2001-07-06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Compare the motivations behind these scripts to that of scripts that appear in fictional literature and popular culture. Although nobody denies the greatness of J.R.R. Tolkein as an author and scholar, it is extremely unlikely that he intended the beautiful and carefully designed Tengwar and Cirth scripts to be used by real humans to write real languages for use in everyday life. Tolkien knew that others shared his secret vice and was delighted when school children wrote him to say they had made an Elvish vocabulary. He wrote letters to some of them using his alphabets. He published an appendix explaining the writing system. Why? For the joy of it. Why do people devise Tengwar modes for Hebrew and Yiddish, and practice Tengwar calligraphy in Russian and Sindarin? And they encode texts using it. Would Tolkien have approved? Very much so, I am sure -- he would have been fascinated by it. We don't use Egyptian or Luvian or Ogham for use in every day life, well at least most of you don't (I confess to refrigerator notes written in the script-of-the-week). -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian
At 08:00 +0100 2001-07-06, David Starner wrote: Could you find fault with some one who chose not to work with Cham because it was in the same consideration list as the (dead) Egyptian Hieroglyphics? I don't believe the Vietnamese national body (which originally sponsored Cham, providing me with a very big Cham dictionary to help) holds this view. The reason the Vietnamese are not pressing Cham encoding is that they don't have funds for it now. I can't press it because I need their input. -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian
At 03:50 +0100 2001-07-06, David Starner wrote: A lot of the arguments against Klingon weren't specificially against Klingon; they were more against any fictional scripts in Unicode. But arguments don't hold water. Criteria for encoding scripts or symbols are that (1) they are used by enough people who need to transfer data, (2) they are important enough historically with regard to the representation of the recorded data of humankind. Now some of (2) have a handful of documents and hardly any users. Some of (1) are fictional (whatever that means -- all writing systems are artifacts) but have a great many users. Klingon failed not because it was Klingon, but because speakers of that language themselves don't really use it except ornamentally, as gifs in web pages and so on. Translations of Hamlet are published in the Latin script. Grammars and dictionaries use the Latin script. The editorial response to comments from national groups, in the public archive of ISO 10646 stuff that you linked to at the start of this message, included a complaint about Deseret from the German Standards body, in that it was inappropriate for being a fictional script. The response to that was bascially Not really, IIRC. That does not bode well for lack of contention for later scripts. The folks at DIN were wrong about Deseret, in my opinion. It seems to me that they did not know what Deseret was. Whether it had a long life is irrelevant. That script is of cultural importance to a rather sizeable community of people, and, is of interest to students of writing systems, English phonology, and the history of Mormonism. -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian
At 07:15 +0100 2001-07-06, David Starner wrote: What's bad is that work seems to get done on fictional scripts while there Really? There's only one fictional script encoded, and one on the fast track to encoding. Deseret isn't fictional. And, to be precise, we don't fast track encoding. Shavian will go through the normal ballotting procedure. Both those are simple non-shaping, non-combining LTR scripts with a very well defined closed set of characters. It probably only took an afternoon to write up either of them. I think that more effort has been wasted debating fictional scripts on [EMAIL PROTECTED] than it will take to get them encoded. Well there are only two on the roadmap yet to encode, Tengwar and Cirth. Tengwar is complex, and it'd be better for us to make sure Lepcha and Limbu and Tai and Cham are sorted out. (Now, Phoenician and Old Persian Cuneiform will probably be pushed through sooner rather than later, because they are very simple scripts.) There are various reasons for that, the most common being that we can't get enough information about them. The most common reason for not having enough information is that we can't shlep enough experts to us, nor shlep enough of us to the experts, to complete any encoding proposals... a matter of time and funds. How does encoding fictional scripts affect this one way or another? There are a handful of us really interested in working on getting new stuff into the standard (entire scripts, anyway). It takes time and expertise to do these. For some scripts, it's hard to find experts to discuss the issues with. Or when we do find them, they don't use e-mail or don't understand Unicode, or whatever. I'm sure that with adequate funding, for instance, somebody like me could spend a couple of weeks in London libraries and cultural organizations finding the right people and nailing down the answers for a good many of the Brahmic scripts currently roadmapped. It'd be so easy if one were independently wealthy. :-) In the meantime, one has to pay the rent. :-) This problem isn't new. It's going to get worse, too, as possibly some of the bigger companies may stop paying their employees to work on Unicode stuff since all the major living scripts are encoded (if not implemented). Not that one intends to give up -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian
At 02:34 -0400 2001-07-06, John Cowan wrote: The most common reason for not having enough information is that we can't shlep enough experts to us, nor shlep enough of us to the experts, to complete any encoding proposals... a matter of time and funds. Just so, which means that the energy spent on invented scripts is nowise taken away from the energy that could be spent on obscure-but-real scripts. Would that it were otherwise. I try to balance work on the dead ones with work on the living ones. -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian
At 22:03 -0700 2001-07-05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That was in WG2, I guess... The most recent discussion material that UTC saw is a document I wrote, which is solely about Klingon and reasons for rejecting it. WG2 never discussed Klingon, formally. Fictional or invented scripts aren't in and of themselves bad candidates for encoding, they should just be, in general, of low priority because, pretty much without exception, they are toys. Shavian and Deseret are examples of scripts that needn't have been encoded now, and aren't very widely used, and aren't _NEEDED_ by anyone at all, but were encoded because a while back someone just happened to have done the work, and the proposals have just been sitting around gathering dust. Might as well get them in, because nothing more needs to be done to the proposals. I don't think Deseret was fictional. Even if it was marginal. But they were simple to encode. What's bad is that work seems to get done on fictional scripts while there are still millions of real people (some of whom even have access to computers) who can't express texts of their natively-used languages with Unicode because we don't have their scripts encoded. Shavian and Deseret didn't take a lot of work. We did, however, a fair bit of work on Linear B, Ugaritic, Cypriot, Old Italic, and Gothic recently. I've tried to get progress on the Tai scripts, but as the Chinese haven't sent delegations to the last two WG2 meetings, naturally no progress has been made. (I am sure they will be turning up to Singapore, and won't they be unhappy if I don't turn up, due to the cost of getting there Sigh.) There are various reasons for that, the most common being that we can't get enough information about them. The most common reason for not having enough information is that we can't shlep enough experts to us, nor shlep enough of us to the experts, to complete any encoding proposals... a matter of time and funds. Indeed. Cham (from Vietnam) should probably have been encoded long ago. There are some outstanding questions, and there is the question of improving the font for it. -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian
At 3:50 AM +0100 7/6/01, David Starner wrote: A lot of the arguments against Klingon weren't specificially against Klingon; they were more against any fictional scripts in Unicode. True, but the criterion being applied by the UTC is whether or not there are users of the script who wish to exchange data using it. There are also periodic objections from various states to providing characters or scripts used by minority languages which they wish would go away. Unicode's criteria are different. The editorial response to comments from national groups, in the public archive of ISO 10646 stuff that you linked to at the start of this message, included a complaint about Deseret from the German Standards body, in that it was inappropriate for being a fictional script. Excuse me??!? The response to that was bascially Not really, IIRC. That does not bode well for lack of contention for later scripts. Deseret is a bad example to use. Deseret is *not* a fictional script. It *is* a modern invented script with slight current utility, but it *does* have people who want to use it, and there is a surprisingly large body of diaries and other historical records from the 19th century written using it. -- = John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
Re: Shavian
In a message dated 2001-07-06 3:23:51 Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The folks at DIN were wrong about Deseret, in my opinion. It seems to me that they did not know what Deseret was. Whether it had a long life is irrelevant. That script is of cultural importance to a rather sizeable community of people, and, is of interest to students of writing systems, English phonology, and the history of Mormonism. Indeed, it appeared as the sole script on a beautiful $5 gold coin issued in 1860 by a private mint in Salt Lake City that was owned and operated by Brigham Young. The coin is listed in the respected Guide Book of U.S. Coins, along with earlier Mormon gold pieces that were issued before the invention of the Deseret alphabet. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
Re: Shavian
Doug Ewell wrote: Indeed, it appeared as the sole script on a beautiful $5 gold coin issued in 1860 by a private mint in Salt Lake City that was owned and operated by Brigham Young. The coin is listed in the respected Guide Book of U.S. Coins, along with earlier Mormon gold pieces that were issued before the invention of the Deseret alphabet. The coin in question is quite rare and valuable. It's also listed in (Krause) Standard Catalog of World Coins. The pictures in both Yeoman and Krause are a bit blurry, but the inscription appears to say holiness to the lord. Using the ConScript encoding, . Best regards, James Kass.
Re: Shavian
From: Michael Everson [EMAIL PROTECTED] The editorial response to comments from national groups, in the public archive of ISO 10646 stuff that you linked to at the start of this message, included a complaint about Deseret from the German Standards body, in that it was inappropriate for being a fictional script. Excuse me??!? That's what you get for missing WG2 meetings, John. Yup, that's what the German ballot comments said. We dismissed them. Politely. :-) It seems both of you missed the subtext here, and the reason that the attempt to introduce fictional scripts might cause consternation (the original point here)? The German ballot comments about Deseret were dismissed on the basis that it was not, in fact, a fictional script. Obviously a dismissal worded the same way for an actual fictional script would not be possible, and the resistance to fictional scripts will have to be directly addressed? MichKa Michael Kaplan Trigeminal Software, Inc. http://www.trigeminal.com/
Re: Shavian
At 09:53 -0700 2001-07-06, Michael \(michka\) Kaplan wrote: It seems both of you missed the subtext here, and the reason that the attempt to introduce fictional scripts might cause consternation (the original point here)? The German ballot comments about Deseret were dismissed on the basis that it was not, in fact, a fictional script. Obviously a dismissal worded the same way for an actual fictional script would not be possible, and the resistance to fictional scripts will have to be directly addressed? No, if, or when, they make the same objection to Tengwar we will just have to dismiss the objection on other grounds, namely, the importance of Tolkien's work and the rather large community of users who wish to exchange data using these scripts. -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian
MichKa wrote: It seems both of you missed the subtext here, and the reason that the attempt to introduce fictional scripts might cause consternation (the original point here)? The German ballot comments about Deseret were dismissed on the basis that it was not, in fact, a fictional script. Obviously a dismissal worded the same way for an actual fictional script would not be possible, and the resistance to fictional scripts will have to be directly addressed? I've been lurking on this discussion, but have to chime in here. A couple correspondents have pointed out the problems with the misnomer fictional script. Part of the reason, in my opinion, why we keep going round and round on this topic is that the terminology itself bends peoples' minds inappropriately. I get the strong impression that for some people the argument seems to go: P: Fictional scripts should not be encoded in Unicode. Q: Klingon, Tengwar, Cirth, (and Deseret, ...) are fictional scripts. Therefore R: Klingon, Tengwar, Cirth should not be encoded in Unicode. Simple and irrefutable, unless you deny both the premises and the assertions of P and Q. Everson pointed out (as have others) that *all* scripts are artifacts. Some, like Latin and Greek, are cultural transmissions from earlier forms, which gradually changed through use until they came to have separate identities from their antecedents. Others were more or less created on the spot, as it were, by a single individual or group working intentionally on the creation of an entire script. Of those, some, like Hangul, were magnificent successes, and have come to see everyday use by millions of people. Some, like Shavian, were magnificent failures, admired in the attempt, and still used by small groups of enthusiasts, but of no significant commercial or economic worth, and of marginal literary worth. Some, like Tengwar, have taken a somewhat different path. Tolkien constructed it for aesthetic and literary purposes, and certainly never had the intent of someone like Shaw, to use it for the reform or replacement of an existing orthography. However, unlike Shavian, Tengwar has had a kind of organic success of a sort, spreading in its aesthetic and literary realm, and gaining a group of adherents. The fact that Tengwar is used to express a language that itself was also consciously constructed does not, as I see it, render it any less suitable for the purposes it is intended and used. After all, the Latin script is also used to express constructed languages such as Esperanto. I see no *moral* distinction here, even if Tengwar is more often put to the purpose of writing romantic nature poetry, whereas Esperanto tends to discussions of world government. ;-) And as I have said before, I see nothing inherently less worthwhile in a well-constructed Elvish poem expressed in Tengwar than in a warehouse record from Uruk expressed in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Jenkins hit this nail on the head when he pointed out that the basic Unicode criterion for coding-worthiness is the existence of a significant group of people who wish to exchange text in the script in question. We can quibble about what it means to be a significant group in this context, and we certainly should want to weigh factors such as how large a group, how much text, and the costs of encoding and implementation versus the needs. But I think it is just counterproductive to keep obsessing on the imagined distinction of fictional versus (what?) real status of the scripts in question. Klingon (the pseudoscript) was rejected because it failed the basic criterion for coding-worthiness, as well as a whole list of other criteria that Rick listed in his document. Tengwar is a completely different case. It meets all the criteria, and is appropriate to have on the Roadmap. That doesn't mean that it is a high priority -- in fact, as has been pointed out, more energy has been spent gassing about it on this list than has actually gone into encoding it. But in any case I consider it inappropriate to keep labelling it a fictional script. It is a real script and people use it. If you want to toss around the term fictional script, I suggest you apply it to things like Jindai, where we know that a bunch of purported alphabets were simply hoaxes invented to further political agendas. They were truly fictional from the beginning, and weren't used except to discuss the fake examples and make up more fake examples. If *that* is what the term fictional script means, then, yes, I agree that fictional scripts should not be encoded in Unicode. But if DIN (or somebody else) objects in the future to the encoding of Tengwar because it is a fictional script, then I think the answer simply has to involve the rectification of terms, since Tengwar is *not* a fictional script. And DIN has no business objecting to the inclusion of a real script that has a demonstrated body of users who wish to exchange textual data on the Internet and by other
Re: Shavian
From: Kenneth Whistler [EMAIL PROTECTED] I've been lurking on this discussion, but have to chime in here. I do appreciate it, for what its worth. The chime was very much in tune. While fully recognizing the importance of Middle Earth to some people it is difficult for me to get past the fact that there Middle Earth has no national representative to WG2? :-) And of course anything that is difficult for me will likely be difficult for others. And the same people who push so hard for these scripts may never know why it is so hard to find experts for other scripts who are willing to help. Perhaps those experts just did not want their scripts to be given equal footing with those of the _Elvish Linguistic Fellowship_ or similar organizations? It certainly gives me pause. Obviously this will not be enough to away any of those who are truly committed to representing the interests of the elves, or the people who want to write like elves, or whoever it is they are in fact representing. You can just call me a consciencious objector to having anyone who subscribes to Vinyar Tengwar considering themselves to be among the Númenoreans (a.k.a. the Dúnedain), who alone of all the races of Men knew Elvish tongues. :-) michka (who loved Tolkien yet nevertheless decided to leave middle earth)
Re: Shavian
MichKa responded: While fully recognizing the importance of Middle Earth to some people it is difficult for me to get past the fact that there Middle Earth has no national representative to WG2? :-) But this is, of course, nearly irrelevant. If you prowl through the unencoded scripts listed in the Roadmap documents now, there is almost nothing left where we would expect a national representative to show up at WG2 -- or are you expecting Babylonians, Hittites, and Nabataeans to show up any time soon? Even for the minority scripts, we no longer have national representatives -- instead we have the big national governments showing up speaking for minorities on their territories (if they care). Sometimes those minorities are ethnic minorities in the classic sense, and other times they are scholarly minorities who happen to claim a certain jurisdiction in the area by virtue of academic expertise. Hence Germany is claiming expertise on a number of historic scripts of the Middle East, not because of any territorial association, but simply because the German scholars care about the subject matter. I see no defensible line here, if American, British, and Irish scholars claim expertise in something like Tengwar and wish to see it encoded. And of course anything that is difficult for me will likely be difficult for others. Of course. ;-) And the same people who push so hard for these scripts may never know why it is so hard to find experts for other scripts who are willing to help. Perhaps those experts just did not want their scripts to be given equal footing with those of the _Elvish Linguistic Fellowship_ or similar organizations? I think this is an utter nonissue. As Rick pointed out, the reason why Cham is not progressing has to do with funding for minority language support and standardization work in Vietnam, not because some key Cham scholar is miffed about Elvish. The reasons for funding problems in Vietnam are economic and political, and don't have any demonstrable connection to arguments on the Unicode list about the decoration of Star Trek sets at Paramount. It certainly gives me pause. ...that refreshes. Obviously this will not be enough to away any of those who are truly committed to representing the interests of the elves, or the people who want to write like elves, or whoever it is they are in fact representing. You can just call me a consciencious objector to having anyone who subscribes to Vinyar Tengwar considering themselves to be among the Númenoreans (a.k.a. the Dúnedain), who alone of all the races of Men knew Elvish tongues. :-) Aha! I see you are more of a true believer than the true believers. So your problem is that the *wrong* group is claiming jurisdiction here, and you would prefer to wait for the Númenoreans to show up in person at WG2 before progressing any Tengwar proposal. --Ken michka (who loved Tolkien yet nevertheless decided to leave middle earth)
Re: Shavian
From: Kenneth Whistler [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can just call me a consciencious objector to having anyone who subscribes to Vinyar Tengwar considering themselves to be among the Númenoreans (a.k.a. the Dúnedain), who alone of all the races of Men knew Elvish tongues. :-) Aha! I see you are more of a true believer than the true believers. So your problem is that the *wrong* group is claiming jurisdiction here, and you would prefer to wait for the Númenoreans to show up in person at WG2 before progressing any Tengwar proposal. Heh heh heh, I would no quite *that* far -- I don't believe in Middle Earth the way some of those folks do. I just think they are great stories and would hate to disprove any aspect of the myth surrounding them, thats all. MichKa Michael Kaplan Trigeminal Software, Inc. http://www.trigeminal.com/
Re: Shavian
[EMAIL PROTECTED] scripsit: Although nobody denies the greatness of J.R.R. Tolkien as an author and scholar, it is extremely unlikely that he intended the beautiful and carefully designed Tengwar and Cirth scripts to be used by real humans to write real languages for use in everyday life. Well, real humans *have* done so, starting with JRRT and his son Christopher, and going on to lots of enthusiasts, and if they are not exactly used for laundry lists, the same is true of many other scripts as well. (Elfling is just discussing whether we know how to write *Gandalf Tea Wednesday* in Elvish.) Furthermore, the Tengwar and the Cirth have been used and are being used to write English as well as JRRT's invented languages, and in such a way that (unlike Pigpen, e.g.) they cannot be taken as mere ciphers. This goes double for some of the other scripts listed in the ConScript registry. Some appear *only* on the author's Web pages, alongside elaborate descriptions of fantasy worlds. I don't think that anyone, certainly not Michael or I, ever intended the CSUR as a sort of vestibule or waiting area for Unicode registry. Lots of the scripts there should never move from it. But some few have Real World justifications which ought not to be dismissed out of hand. I do believe that original intent has something to do with the legitimacy of a script for consideration in Unicode. Something, but not everything; how the script has come to be used is also relevant. The original intent of Americai Spek was the same as Shavian, but it didn't take off even in the limited way that Shavian has, and it should stay in the CSUR. Remember that all scripts, including Latin, Arabic, Han, Shavian, and Klingon, were invented by humans. Hear, hear. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore --Douglas Hofstadter
Re: Shavian
Kenneth Whistler scripsit: [much good sense snipped] However, unlike Shavian, Tengwar has had a kind of organic success of a sort, spreading in its aesthetic and literary realm, and gaining a group of adherents. It turns out that Shavian too has its group of adherents: see previous postings, and particularly the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list, which has been running some 60 postings a month lately. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore --Douglas Hofstadter
Re: Shavian
In a message dated 2001-07-06 17:25:33 Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Although nobody denies the greatness of J.R.R. Tolkien as an author and scholar, it is extremely unlikely that he intended the beautiful and carefully designed Tengwar and Cirth scripts to be used by real humans to write real languages for use in everyday life. Well, real humans *have* done so, starting with JRRT and his son Christopher, and going on to lots of enthusiasts, and if they are not exactly used for laundry lists, the same is true of many other scripts as well. Perhaps I should have said that real-life use was not Tolkien's *primary* intent for the scripts. Of course there are some who might want to use them, more or less seriously. I can identify with Michael Everson and his refrigerator notes because I do the same thing, although my repertoire is certainly much more limited than his. I sometimes write shopping lists and such in Cyrillic, Greek, Runic, or my own conscript. If someone wants to do the same with Tengwar or Cirth, more power to them. The difference is that Deseret and Shavian were designed with this as the *primary* goal -- that people would use these scripts on *at least* equal footing with the Latin script, for everything from shopping lists and love letters to traffic signs, marriage licenses and government proclamations. Furthermore, the Tengwar and the Cirth have been used and are being used to write English as well as JRRT's invented languages, and in such a way that (unlike Pigpen, e.g.) they cannot be taken as mere ciphers. Very true. How did these usages develop? Are they mentioned in Tolkien's manuscripts, or did they develop later? This goes double for some of the other scripts listed in the ConScript registry. Some appear *only* on the author's Web pages, alongside elaborate descriptions of fantasy worlds. I don't think that anyone, certainly not Michael or I, ever intended the CSUR as a sort of vestibule or waiting area for Unicode registry. Lots of the scripts there should never move from it. But some few have Real World justifications which ought not to be dismissed out of hand. I definitely agree, and did not intend to sound otherwise. In addition to the scripts that have been proposed for Unicode (Deseret, Klingon, Tengwar, Cirth), there are lots of scripts that haven't been and never will be. As I wrote some months ago, I proposed my own conscript for CSUR but would never dream of proposing it for Unicode, because it doesn't belong there. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
Re: Shavian
At 12:38 -0700 2001-07-04, Michael \(michka\) Kaplan wrote: Fictional scripts have been, are, and will likely continue to be a constant source of contention for both Unicode and 10646 for years to come. Klingon is such a script, but didn't meet certain criteria and was rejected. Aiha didn't meet them either (the only mention of it on the web was the Roadmap!), so we took it out. Tengwar and Cirth meet the criteria admirably -- far better than some of the historical scripts like Carian. There aren't any other fictional scripts roadmapped, except Sarati, grandmother of Tengwar, which waits in the wings at present. So what is the source of contention? I would welcome evidence that there are in fact supplementary character fonts that will be produced, and of course evidence that the user community would actually have the software needed to use these fonts or input methods to type the characters? Fonts for Shavian and Deseret exist. Input methods exist at least for Deseret. Of course the bonus would be having Microsoft and IBM support the conversion of legacy data. My heart palpitates at seeing that build of ICU! You might say the same for Gothic or Phoenician. As for whether your script would be encoded, where it ends up vis-a-vis the potetial roadmap is more a side effect of who you know than anything else. :-) I don't think that's really fair. (Yes, I see the smiley.) What, Michka, is on the Roadmap that you think oughtn't be there? What scripts were proposed that didn't get in because the Ad-Hoc wasn't, ah, properly motivated? :-) :-) -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian
Michael Everson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 12:38 -0700 2001-07-04, Michael \(michka\) Kaplan wrote: Fictional scripts have been, are, and will likely continue to be a constant source of contention for both Unicode and 10646 for years to come. Klingon is such a script, but didn't meet certain criteria and was rejected. [...] So what is the source of contention? A lot of the arguments against Klingon weren't specificially against Klingon; they were more against any fictional scripts in Unicode. The editorial response to comments from national groups, in the public archive of ISO 10646 stuff that you linked to at the start of this message, included a complaint about Deseret from the German Standards body, in that it was inappropriate for being a fictional script. The response to that was bascially Not really, IIRC. That does not bode well for lack of contention for later scripts. -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Shavian
David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote... A lot of the arguments against Klingon weren't specificially against Klingon; That was in WG2, I guess... The most recent discussion material that UTC saw is a document I wrote, which is solely about Klingon and reasons for rejecting it. Fictional or invented scripts aren't in and of themselves bad candidates for encoding, they should just be, in general, of low priority because, pretty much without exception, they are toys. Shavian and Deseret are examples of scripts that needn't have been encoded now, and aren't very widely used, and aren't _NEEDED_ by anyone at all, but were encoded because a while back someone just happened to have done the work, and the proposals have just been sitting around gathering dust. Might as well get them in, because nothing more needs to be done to the proposals. What's bad is that work seems to get done on fictional scripts while there are still millions of real people (some of whom even have access to computers) who can't express texts of their natively-used languages with Unicode because we don't have their scripts encoded. There are various reasons for that, the most common being that we can't get enough information about them. The most common reason for not having enough information is that we can't shlep enough experts to us, nor shlep enough of us to the experts, to complete any encoding proposals... a matter of time and funds. Rick
Re: Shavian (was: Re: UTF-17)
Michael Everson wrote: UTC approved it and there's a new document from John Jenkins and me on Shavian for WG2, so it should get approved for ballotting at the next meeting of WG2. Hi Michael, I'm new to the idea that anyone would care to have Shavian encoded. Will you enlighten me? Best, Richard
Re: Shavian (was: Re: UTF-17)
At 11:10 -0700 2001-07-04, Richard Cook wrote: Michael Everson wrote: UTC approved it and there's a new document from John Jenkins and me on Shavian for WG2, so it should get approved for ballotting at the next meeting of WG2. Hi Michael, I'm new to the idea that anyone would care to have Shavian encoded. Will you enlighten me? Easily: just read http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2362.pdf. -- Michael Everson
Re: Shavian (was: Re: UTF-17)
Michael Everson wrote: At 11:10 -0700 2001-07-04, Richard Cook wrote: Michael Everson wrote: UTC approved it and there's a new document from John Jenkins and me on Shavian for WG2, so it should get approved for ballotting at the next meeting of WG2. Hi Michael, I'm new to the idea that anyone would care to have Shavian encoded. Will you enlighten me? Easily: just read http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2362.pdf. C. Technical -- Justification 1. Contact with the user community? Yes, such as it is. funny :-) now, I know of other phonemic alphabets for English ... e.g., I think Ben Franklin invented one, ... and I have one of my own. Are any of these slated for encoding too?
Re: Shavian (was: Re: UTF-17)
From: Richard Cook [EMAIL PROTECTED] now, I know of other phonemic alphabets for English ... e.g., I think Ben Franklin invented one, ... and I have one of my own. Are any of these slated for encoding too? Fictional scripts have been, are, and will likely continue to be a constant source of contention for both Unicode and 10646 for years to come. I would welcome evidence that there are in fact supplementary character fonts that will be produced, and of course evidence that the user community would actually have the software needed to use these fonts or input methods to type the characters? Of course the bonus would be having Microsoft and IBM support the conversion of legacy data. My heart palpitates at seeing that build of ICU! As for whether your script would be encoded, where it ends up vis-a-vis the potetial roadmap is more a side effect of who you know than anything else. :-) MichKa Michael Kaplan Trigeminal Software, Inc. http://www.trigeminal.com/
Re: Shavian (was: Re: UTF-17)
At 12:38 PM -0700 7/4/01, Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote: I would welcome evidence that there are in fact supplementary character fonts that will be produced, and of course evidence that the user community would actually have the software needed to use these fonts or input methods to type the characters? FWIW, there is a small but non-zero Shavian user community, and a number of fonts are available, some of them very pretty. -- = John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
Re: Shavian (was: Re: UTF-17)
From: John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] FWIW, there is a small but non-zero Shavian user community, and a number of fonts are available, some of them very pretty. Of this I have no doubt -- but this was true of Klingon, also. g I was expressing doubt that the majority of the community are: 1) truly unhappy with their current fonts, and 2) eagerly awaiting encoding so that they can use supplementary character fonts, and 3) will upgrade software as needed to accomplish #2 And then of course seeing folks provide means for conversion from their current code pages to Unicode seems pretty far off, too would ICU really provide it? Would Microsoft? Would Apple? Will Oracle have a legacy database encoding for it? Maybe someone can provide evidence that my [low key] concern is unfounded? MichKa Michael Kaplan Trigeminal Software, Inc. http://www.trigeminal.com/
Re: Shavian (was: Re: UTF-17)
From: John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] As for whether your script would be encoded, where it ends up vis-a-vis the potential roadmap is more a side effect of who you know than anything else. Smiley or not, someone might actually believe that, and it isn't true. Michael Everson is more than open-minded about such things. Well, I did mean in reference to fictional scripts (the subtopic of the current conversation, such as it is). Michael is certainly someone you would want to be aware of a fictional script if you wanted it encoded? Is anyone aware of such a script whose proposal did not benefit from his involvement? I think the work speaks for itself, and people can draw their own conclusions from it (for good or evil or other!), so I will not cast dispersions on any of it. :-) MichKa Michael Kaplan Trigeminal Software, Inc. http://www.trigeminal.com/
Re: Shavian (was: Re: UTF-17)
Michael \(michka\) Kaplan scripsit: As for whether your script would be encoded, where it ends up vis-a-vis the potential roadmap is more a side effect of who you know than anything else. Smiley or not, someone might actually believe that, and it isn't true. Michael Everson is more than open-minded about such things. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore --Douglas Hofstadter
Re: Shavian (was: Re: UTF-17)
I was expressing doubt that the majority of the community are: 1) truly unhappy with their current fonts, and 2) eagerly awaiting encoding so that they can use supplementary character fonts, and 3) will upgrade software as needed to accomplish #2 If you check out the Shavian group on groups.yahoo.com, there are messages discussing how to use Unicode for Shavian, links to places with Unicode (Conscript) encoded Shavian fonts, and actual messages encoded in Unicode (I believe using the Conscript encoding - I fail to have any Shavian fonts installed to check). Some of the websites linked to include several documents in Shavian in Unicode (Conscript) with notes about how they were going to have to be updated when Shavian actually gets into Unicode. Of all the communities I've seen discussing Unicodization, this one seems the most eager and ready. As for conversions - we're not talking a large amount of data in databases and what not. Most of what I saw was UTF-8 text files, and it take all of 15 minutes for me (not exactly a programming god) to write a program to convert that from Conscript encoding to Unicode, and most of that deciding whether to use the full force of a mighty Unicode library, or go at the byte values with tr. -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Shavian (was: Re: UTF-17)
UTC approved it and there's a new document from John Jenkins and me on Shavian for WG2, so it should get approved for ballotting at the next meeting of WG2. -- Michael Everson
