I do not always agree with Michael, but your conclusion is absurd.
1. Michael has made some very good contributions to the work of script encoding,
which involves quite a bit of work. Experts in academic communities are free to
do the same; and if they care about their areas of work, they will. And unless
they are living in caves in the mountains of Tibet, there is no reason for them
not to be aware of Unicode and its impact of the ability to encode text on their
area of study.
I agree. Of course Michael has done a lot of good work. So have others. But no one expert's understanding is perfect, and so their opinion needs to be checked, wherever possible with members of the user community, or of as many as possible of a range of user communities. This is what was lacking with Phoenician, also apparently with Coptic (originally) and Kurdish although I now understand that the responsibility for this was not Michael's. The problem arose only when users of Phoenician made their own contributions, and they were rejected as absurd and not worthy of serious answer.
2. Michael is not the only person working on scripts; he is one of many people.
So there is quite a bit of cross-checking, plus the opportunity for public
review.
I am glad to hear it.
3. My issue was not so much with Michael's conclusion as with the way in which
he expressed himself.
So was mine. In fact I now agree with his conclusion.
The issues with modern scripts are relatively straightforward (although even
there, there can be reasonable disagreement). When we get into historic scripts,
we do need to make the effort to refine the model that we are using to encode
scripts, to avoid the kinds of pointless discussions that we have seen lately.
This involves a review of the factors that we should take into account in
determining whether to unify two scripts or not, to make sure that they make
sense for historic scripts. That is already on the agenda for the next UTC
meeting in June.
Agreed, and I am glad to hear it.
Mark
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
