On 07/26/2002 12:29:53 AM "James Kass" wrote:
>> Your proposed characters must first achieve popular usage before they >> will be encoded. > >Isn't this kind of a Catch-22 for anyone contemplating script reform? Of course. Part of the problem is what the status of the proposed script reform. Is it a single company or perhaps an individual suggesting that the country should change? Then the likelihood of success is (all other things being equal) low. Is it a government mandate? Then the likelihood of success is high. It may be anywhere in between. I'd suggest that the IT industry probably is not the appropriate forum within which to introduce writing system reforms. Probably, that should happen in government-related bodies, in schools and various other contexts before it reaches IT. If a government is backing it, then they can make proposals to relevant IT standards bodies, and those proposal could be weighed by the standards bodies by how committed the government in question is to the change. But there is too much risk involved if someone attempts to use technology or a technology product as the vehicle by which to introduce proposed changes. >Do we discourage people from altering their own scripts? Should we? No to both questions, I think. But neither should we change the course of an international standard over something that may be a passing fancy. (This is a general statement; I don't know enough about the Tamil case to know what the status of that is.) >It is suggested that scripts can be "alive" in the same sense that >languages are "alive"; changes (which are part of life) just occur >much more slowly in scripts. I generally agree. And that slowness can be significant. For instance, it has been hard enough for people in German-speaking nations of Europe to adapt to spelling reforms, and that just involves different sequencing of characters without changing the inventory of characters or the way they're written. Throw the latter into the mix, and the inertia to overcome is going to be rather greater. There can be exceptions, of course, as in the case of Turkish, but in that case the pre-reform conventions had many strikes against them since literacy levels were very low, and the Arabic script was very poorly suited to represent Turkish phonology. Because of complexity, there may be factors weighing in favour of the viability of writing reform for Tamil. I have heard that there is some interest (still limited) among Bengalis in the UK to adopting Siloti Nagri script for writing Bengali because it is so much simpler. Having heard of that, I can find it believable that there may be interest within communities using other Indic scripts to pursue simplifications in writing. Even so, we probably don't want to expend a lot of resources within the IT industry supporting changes without having first convinced ourselves that the changes are going to be viable. I don't know enough about the Tamil case to know how far away we are from that. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485 E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>