Peter Kirk suggested: > Similarly, I suppose, with the proposed Phoenician script: each > character could be given a compatibility decomposition to the equivalent > Hebrew letter. This implies automatic interleaved collation. Now, while > I don't expect Michael Everson to jump at this suggestion,
Not only will Michael Everson not jump *at* this suggestion, I will jump *on* it. We've already had the (tedious) discussion about interleaved collation. Whatever the merits of interleaving two related scripts in the Default Unicode Collation Element Table, at least in that context the equivalencing of weights is entirely a matter for the UCA (and ISO 14651) collation standards. But proposing compatibility decompositions to do this automatically would drag *normalization* into the fray as well. And for this particular proposal you'd end up with two encoded scripts which would fold together for some normalization forms (NFKC and NFKD) and would *NOT* fold together for some normalization forms (NFC and NFD). I would consider that very unintuitive and bad behavior -- likely to introduce more problems than it attempts to solve. There have been no precedents in the standard where *normalization* attempts to equate two scripts in the standard. That is considered to be the province of transliteration, rather than normalization. I think the chances that the UTC would seriously consider a proposal to give compatibility decompositions to an entire script equating it to another script to be very low indeed. > I do think > that it should be considered as a compromise between the otherwise > irreconcilable desires of many to unify the two scripts and of some to > separate them. I do not consider it a compromise. It is *worse* than merely considering the collation interleaving issues on their own merit. --Ken
