Andrew West wrote: > On Mon, 18 Nov 2002 02:34:18 -0800 (PST), Kenneth Whistler wrote: > > > In point of fact, > > people for centuries have been borrowing back and forth between > > Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic in particular, so that in some respects > > LGC is a kind of metascript and should be treated as such. > > > > Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Runic even (cf. Latin letters Thorn and Wynn).
Point taken. And don't forget Old Italic, which is now encoded as well. > > Gothic is a good example of a mixed-script writing system, Not really -- a good example, that is. > composed of a mixture > of Latin, Greek and Runic letters. There is a "Gothicness" about the graphic > forms of the glyphs of the Gothic alphabet, but IMHO this variation from > "standard" (but what is "standard" in 4th century terms ?) Latin, Greek and > Runic letters should be dealt with at the font level. It isn't particularly helpful to go there, since it doesn't fit all that well as merely a font variant of Latin or Greek or Runic. Certainly it *could* be done that way, but for this particular case, the committees were convinced that simply laying out Gothic as a distinct script was more practical. As it stands now, the Gothic bible can be correctly and unambiguously represented in Unicode, using the Gothic script as defined. Not to have encoded the Gothic script would have left us still arguing about which letters from which script to use and how Gothic fonts should be encoded. > Nevertheless, Gothic has > been encoded in Unicode, and this may provide an unwelcome precedent for > encoding other mixed-script writing systems. What you are getting at is the complicated problem of sorting out all the historical connections between various related alphabets and trying to sift them into categories which make sense as scripts and categories which are simply font variants within a script. For modern scripts this is less of a problem, since we have modern practice and typography to rely on to help make the distinctions. For *historic* scripts, on the other hand, it is murkier. Old Italic is a good case in point. It *could* have been treated as another archaic outlier of Greek. The problem with that is that it would have added a few more archaic letters which never show up in modern Greek fonts, and it would have forced distinct archaic fonts to be able to represent Old Italic text reliably. Old Italic texts don't get rendered with a modern Greek font -- it would look ridiculous. Because of this usage pattern, it made sense to the committees to coalesce the various southern Old Italic alphabets (Oscan, Umbrian, Messapian, etc.) into a "script" which would incorporate all the required letters for those alphabets, as *opposed* to Latin or to Greek per se. It is likely that a similar decision will be taken in the future to account for the Alpine alphabets of northern Italy, which are intermediate between Italic and Runic alphabets. What it comes down to is the fact that for historic scripts in particular, there are no defined criteria that would enable us to simply *discover* the right answer regarding the identity of scripts. To a certain extent, the encoding committees need to make arbitrary partitions of historic alphabets through time and space, reflecting scholarly praxis as far as feasible, and then live with the results. At least this procedure makes it *possible* to represent the texts reliably, once the scripts and their variants have been standardized. > > What about the now-defunct Zhuang alphabet (used between 1955 and 1981 in PRC) > that was composed of a cumbersome mixture of Latin, Cyrillic and IPA letters ? > Should the letters of this alphabet be encoded separately in "Zhuang" block, Check the standard: U+0185 LATIN SMALL LETTER TONE SIX U+019C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER TURNED M U+01A8 LATIN SMALL LETTER TONE TWO etc. This issue was decided already in 1989. > or > is it simply the fact that the borrowed letters do not exhibit any distinctive > "Zhuangness" in their graphic form that precludes their being encoded separately > in the same way that Gothic is ? (Or is it perhaps a Eurocentric bias in Unicode > ?) It is getting rather tiresome to have "Eurocentric bias" brandished as a disparagement of an encoding standard, 87% of whose content consists of Han or Hangul characters, and whose maintaining committees are busy finalizing the addition of Limbu, Tai Le, Osmanya, Ugaritic Cuneiform, and Linear B. The UTC met just last week, and voted to start the process of adding the Karoshti script. Yeah, definitely a Eurocentric bias detectable there in that collection of additions. --Ken > > Andrew >
