Dear Leo, Thank you for your kind reply. I hope it will meet anticipated expectations.
Itʼs however shocking that when traditional languages require supplemental means for a performative orthography, this is referred to as «proliferating arbitrary characters defined as "latin letter" in Unicode». I feel with your concern about peopleʼs inertia and their attitude of being eager to cut short, root out, and throw away natureʼs beauties. Applied to aboriginal languages and to proper names, this practice isnʼt like pruning, itʼs like spraying herbicide—and even worse: upon flowers. One often forgets that ancient Romans themselves added “new characters” in order to put themselves into a position to efficiently spell foreign names. We find these additional letters at the very end of the “Roman alphabet”—which turns out to be already a kind of “extended Latin.” Today, Arabic and IPA obviously take over the role that Greek or Phoenician played by the time. The idea that everything must be spelt in US-ASCII, or that everything must be written in Latin-1 or in CP-1252, or that everything must at least be encoded on one single byte, couldnʼt arise before the computer age. Today, our mission if we accept, is to help Unicode to bring the invitation to make a smarter use of the worktool. IMHO, «ease of data interchange» is meant to be ensured by using UTF-8. And even in plain ASCII, non-ASCII characters can be represented as HTML entities. The problem clearly is not interchange, itʼs storage and local processing, thus an issue about software and related hardware. Here are the means to implement respectfulness towards *all* individuals who aim at respecting their language, their traditions, and the values of faithfulness, democracy, and humanity. To win the actual war, we best stop unsupporting our aboriginal and other official languages first. French too must stop to be threatened in Canada. Unity in diversity is part of our strength. I believe that once this thread has been launched on the Unicode Mailing List, that is to be added. Today is likely to be the right time. Best regards, Marcel On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 10:20:35 -0700, Leo Broukhis wrote: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2015-m10/0225.html [Link provided instead of quotation in conformance to List policies.]
