From: "Doug Ewell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > 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.
This depends who is making such proposals. When a non-governmental organization gets some support from a UN institution for education (UNICEF for example), some studies may be started to create or stabilize an orthograph, create a dictionnary, guides for a language grammar or for its translation. Phonetics of endangered languages becomes then important to help maintain this language in its litterary form. Some languages have quite unique sounds, but could look ugly and uneasy to teach if it uses too many diacritics or symbols from an IPA notation. Today it seems reasonnable to promote the adoption of an alphabet based on existing alphabets, but avoiding digraphs can be a requirement, at least for the initial promotion of the litterary form of the spoken language. Also, the importance of surrounding languages in the same area may ease the transition for teaching the local language using the same letters if possible, so that the minority language gets a more immediate support by educated people in that country that are manily taught another official language. So there are reasonnable cases where it is desirable to borrow some "lateral" conventions on letter forms but to respect also the uniqueness of the language to represent with an orthographic system based on a new alphabet. To achieve this goal, some letters need sometimes to be "invented" by modification of other existing "near" letters. When such program succeeds, some representative books will be published with that orthograph, and the most useful ones will be for educational purpose (including religious sacred books like Bible and Quran, if they can be translated accurately into the minority language, as religion is a good motivation to incite people to get litteracy, and get themselves a correct reading of the true text, and then use their litteracy knowledge for commerce, local economical development, or preservation and transmission of their culture).
