/Accordingly both Ewellic and Theban could be treated as ciphers of / /subsets of the Latin script. /
////Michael Everson responded:
I don't see how that follows at all.
We have two scripts in which the forms of the characters are not at all those of the Latin script.
However for both every character can be matched with a corresponding character in the Latin script.
So why would one be called a cipher and one not?
Ewellic, to be sure, does not match one to one with the standard Latin alphabet. But I would presume that when Doug Ewell created it he was familiar with either IPA or some other phonemic/phonetic notation such as that in Webster dictionaries. I would suppose he created Ewellic as a cipher of such characters.
Would Ewellic be any more or less useful if coded as a cipher of IPA characters rather than in the PUA?
I recognize that there is no point in Unicode encoding separately Morse code variants of Braille variants or signal flag variants of the Latin script or bar code characters. (The complete coding of Braille in Unicode is for another level of processing unrelated to representation of characters.)
But if, in your opinion Theban and 3of9 bar code is on the cipher side of a line and Ewellic is on the other side I would like to know the logic on which this line is drawn.
I am suspicious that whether something is or is not in origin a cipher should not be an issue.
What should be a issue is whether something is more *usefully coded* as a separate script or as a font-style variant of characters in existing scripts. I suspect almost no-one would to code Latin-letter Morse code as a separate script, preferring to use a font change if it were desired to render a message in Morse code.
I suspect also that no-one would care one way or the other about encoding Theban or Klingon or Unifon in Unicode instead of using a cipher font except for the prestige of the script being encoded separately in Unicode instead of as a transliteration of a script already encoded.
As far as I can see, for example, Unifon people favor an ASCII cipher encoding over the conscript registry coding of Unifon. An IPA-based cipher encoding might be better.
Jim Allan
