> De : "Shawn Steele" <shawn.ste...@microsoft.com> > A : "verd...@wanadoo.fr" <verd...@wanadoo.fr>, "vanis...@boil.afraid.org" > <vanis...@boil.afraid.org>, "unicode@unicode.org" <unicode@unicode.org> > Copie à : > Objet : RE: A question about "user areas" > > > Anyway, most existing supporters of Tengwar and Cirth (also > > Klingonists) still use some transliteration > > Transliterateability shouldn't be a factor, many of the scripts in Unicode > have been transliterated (like Latin). Perhaps if it was only transliterated > and the script was never used (but then we wouldn't have this conversation if > the script was never used).
It really IS a factor, when most users use it instead of the original script (this is especially true for Klingonists). I was not speaking about the "Transliterateability" (i.e. the possibility of traniterating): this is possible with almost all scripts, except possibly hieroglyphs, sinograms, and pictograms which are not really transliterated but converted according to some possible reading (but also dependening largely on the effective source language and culture, something that cannot be guessed dirctly from the script and requires some additional conventions). > And, (and I really don't want to borrow from "that other" thread, but), > Emoji certainly were constructed characters (I can't even call it a > constructed script) :) A difference would seem to be who is doing the > adoption of the glyphs. (Teenagers vs. sci-fi/fantasy geeks, and misguided > cell-phone marketers trying to get more market share vs. geeks trying to have > fun). I dare suggest that many of the characters encoded in Unicode, even > recently, are, in practice, used less than these 3 scripts. Also I've not written anything about emojis that are completely unrelated, and they are not in the category of a constructed language or script, but are additional signs that may be used in addition to another script, but that have no clear reading, including for their users (they are write-only conventions, which makes them uneligible for use in any humane language). Of course there may be exceptions, when such signs start being borrowed with an unambiguous reading in some language/culture, in a way that may qualify them as new letters, or phonograms/syllables, or words, or conventional abbreviations. One good example is the red heart emoji that is frequently seen on T-shirts and ads, in sentences like "I <heart> NYC" : you can guess the reading as "love" from the context, and this is also used in other languages like French: "J’<heart> Paris"). In such use, you will then frequently see that the pictogram's conventional color does not even matter, only the basic monochromatic glyph shape is important. And even if other words in the sentence use a more conventional script, the whole sentence can be read and understood immediately in lots of other languages, due to the strong meaning of the pictogram.
