Peter Kirk <peterkirk at qaya dot org> wrote:Thanks for the clarification. I don't know the history here, and I had misunderstood Peter C and John C's comments, especially John's "If the rest of you hadn't agreed with his judgments most of the time, the Roadmap might look quite different.", as implying that on such issues (and Peter C named only these two) the UTC agreed with Michael's judgment.
And these two cases are hardly a good advertisement for the expert's
reputation. The Coptic/Greek unification proved to be ill-advised and
is being undone. As for the unified W and Q, well, I guess that if the
Kurds and others who use these letters in Cyrillic knew how this
decision would mean that their alphabet will never be sorted correctly
(unless they get round to tailoring their collations), they would make
a strongly argued case for disunification. Well, perhaps the expert
can feel how much his fingers have been burned by over-unification and
so is now pressing for everything to be disunified.
I can't believe I am reading this. Far more than anyone else, Michael has *always* supported the disunification of Coptic from Greek and of Kurdish Cyrillic Q and W from their Latin counterparts. They have been two of his signature causes through the years.
-Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
In this case I don't understand Peter C's comment, unless he has made the same mistake as me. When he wrote:
I took him as referring to Michael's track record on these two issues. Well, maybe Michael was right and the UTC was wrong on them. But if it is the UTC which at first unsuccessfully dealt with these two issues and has now had to reconsider one of them, then perhaps it is the UTC which has failed to establish a level of confidence.I think one's track record in making judgments on boundary cases is established only after having successfully dealt with boundary cases -- and enough to establish a level of confidence.
Well, at least this makes Michael into a consistent splitter, not someone who has changed his mind on this. Of course the danger of consistency is that it becomes inflexibility in cases where the consistent policy is inappropriate.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
