On Saturday, Oct 18, 2003, at 03:41 Australia/Melbourne, Peter Kirk wrote:
On 17/10/2003 09:12, Nick Nicholas wrote:
That is not true of all ancient scripts. Some, like biblical Hebrew, are still in regular use by specialists as well as non-specialists.
... or for that matter Meroitic" (since, as Bunz has often argued, specialists on ancient languages only ever work in transliteration, so the scholarly market won't use them all that much). ...
Ah, no fair. I don't regard Hebrew as archaic, since it continues in use; the more so since the biblical Hebrew in current use is typographically 9th century AD --- as is for that matter the Greek in current use. And of course, as Elaine has pointed out to us, other archaic Semitic scripts get transliterated *into* Hebrew.
And, as Bunz also argues in http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn3/bunz-iuc17pap.pdf, other ancient scripts, while not much used by specialists for their actual discussions, are nevertheless used in quite widely in tutorial materials and in materials prepared for the general public e.g. popular historical science, enyclopedias etc.
Weeell, yes, but if we're talking raw amount of text appearing in original script and in transliteration, transliteration almost always wins, and by an appreciable margin. Furthermore, transliteration doesn't force you to make determinations on what is emic and what is etic. And this explains why specialists in Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform are reluctant to do anything with them.
I'm not disputing that there's space for archaic scripts, of course (it's all been roadmapped already, after all); nor even that encoding them (if feasible) is a noble and worthy effort. I have after all been involved in preparing such proposals for Archaic and Hellenistic Greek. I'm just pointing out that, in terms of both actual usage and probability of a proposal gelling --- not to mention a user community who would like to have the encoding there --- Klingon does not compare unfavourably with Meroitic, and I think the "disrepute" consideration was as much a consideration as the "actual use". The proof for or against, I guess, will come if Cirth gets into Unicode.
But this issue has provoked grumbles in the past from UTC members --- particularly when someone asked for explicit criteria on including scripts; so like I say, whatever. Klingon's in the PUA, and that's OK. If software can't cope with the PUA, that *is* defeating the purpose of the PUA (two people can and should be allowed to exchange data in it by agreement, they just shouldn't expect everyone else to subscribe to that agreement). Unfortunately there's no block of codepoints in PUA pushing its incorporation into software, the way Cantonese did for the Astral Planes; but it is still a misfeature, and it is appropriate for Mark to complain about it. Though I think the solution is to fix PUA support, not to bring Klingon up to the ISO again...
-------------------- =================================----------------------
Dr Nick Nicholas. Unimelb, Aus. [EMAIL PROTECTED]; www.opoudjis.net
"Electronic editors have to live in hope: hope that the long-awaited
standards for encoding texts for the computer will arrive; hope that they
will be workable; hope that software will appear to handle these texts;
hope that all the scholars of the world will have computers which can
drive the software (which does not yet exist) to handle the texts (which
have not yet been made) encoded in standard computer markup (which has not
yet been devised). To hope for all this requires a considerable belief in
the inevitability of progress and in the essential goodness of mankind."
(Peter M.W. Robinson)
