Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote: >> A problem, however, is that many such forms are found in unstable >> orthographies, and are difficult to document adequately for inclusion >> in proposals. > > This last argument should not be a limitation to encode them. After > all they are used for living languages in danger of extinction, and > even if documents using them are rare, encoding them would help > preserving these languages and helping the development of their > litteracy.
This is expressly NOT a goal of Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646: to encode newly invented, possibly ephemeral, letters on the basis that doing so might encourage literacy and save a language from extinction. As someone once said -- I don't know who, but it sounds like John Cowan -- we already have several hundred Latin letters in Unicode; it shouldn't be difficult to pick one of those when developing a new orthography, instead of inventing yet another way to write [tÊ]. The danger of encoding novel characters on speculation that they might be useful is that if they *don't* turn out to be useful, or if a revised version of the orthography replaces them with something else, Unicode and 10646 are stuck with unwanted characters, which cannot be removed for stability reasons. The Euro sign is a classic counterexample where strong promises of stability and usefulness (which have been amply borne out) outweighed the "newly invented" nature. See the Principles and Procedures document for more information. > Without them, the instability of orthographies will always be a > problem favored by absence of standard to represent them adequately in > any encoding or charset, so that even book publishers and authors will > need to use their own approximations or unstable private conventions > to represent them. This is a problem; in an increasingly Unicode world, it is more difficult than ever to print and interchange one's characters if they are *not* in Unicode. But the burden should still be on the proponents of such a character to prove that it is in actual, stable use, and that the need to print and interchange is real. Otherwise, it's PUA time. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
