?????> From: Jony Rosenne > > Mike Ayers wrote: > > ... > > is it not correct that language scholars are those most likely to be > > able to create and use a nondefault sort order? > > I don't think so. I think they would require some computer expert > to set it up for them.
If they are experts in their domain, they are the most likely to communicate and find technical resources to setup the tailored collation they will need. Scholars most often work for universities, where computer resources is common, and where they will find enough students there to build such tailored rules. On the other side, a basic user of the script will not be able to build such tailored rule and will only depend on what his software will propose to him as a default. Basic users of a script will first want that the default collation works correctly for the simplest case: non-mixed scripts, simply because they will not be able to recognize and read the other one. If that user asks to sort Hebrew and Phenician words, to perform for example full-text searches, he will be disappointed if the search results are mixing these words all together, and will wonder why there are unreadable phoenician words in his list of Hebrew words. Full collation between Phoenician and Hebrew is not really needed: the texts are part of separate corpus, and the original documents do not mix these scripts in the same words. What would be more likely is a document showing inclusions of Phoenician words within a Hebrew text, or annotations in Hebrew added on top of a Phoenician text. We are not in a position like Japanese where scripts are freely mixed including within the same word, and where Hiragana and Katakana can be mxed or modified at will (which is a good justification why these two scritps need to be interleaved today). Phoenician and Hebrew are separate both in terms of time (history), and space (local communities using the languages, and texts corpus), so interleaving is not needed.
