Rick McGowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > We (in UTC) have seen situations before where one group desires an > encoding for a script that is strongly opposed by another group -- > even for the *same* language in the *same* historical period.
Ol Chiki, for example. There is a { large, vocal } group that opposes the encoding of Ol Chiki because of fears it will somehow encourage the spread of an "inferior" regional variant of the Santali language, spoken by those Santalis who prefer Ol Chiki over a Latin orthography. The group claims that if Ol Chiki were encoded, users of Santali would be "forced" to use it instead of Latin, thus causing the Santali language to "deviate from the path of rectitude" and maybe also causing the earth to collapse into the sun, or something. I've been thinking about these claims about Ol Chiki as I read recent comments that separate encoding of Phoenician would screw up text searches that have been optimized for Phoenician text encoded using Hebrew or "high-ASCII" font hacks. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/