On 6/9/2012 3:35 PM, Michael Everson wrote:
On 9 Jun 2012, at 23:09, Asmus Freytag wrote:
And in so saying, I'd like to see a shopping list, hastily written. Notes taken
at speed in class. Personal signatures.
Practicality doesn't enter.
Yes, it does, O wise and axiomatic Asmus.
If there's evidence of significant usage, then that should suffice. I don't
care whether there are shopping lists.
I do. I don't think that this thing as designed is stable,
That is a reasonable concern - but not identical to whether you judge
this script as "practical"
and if we encode it on spec now before users modify it we will be in for
revisiting things later. Unless it can be shown that this is actually practical
and usable, it won't have had enough track-record to get encoded.
It's a question also of level of usage. If you have millions of
documents in an early form of a script, then you may have a historical
script on your hands if & when a shift occurs. Some countries change
orthographies every few decades - you still deploy spell checkers for
the most recent and current one and don't wait for the next "shift".
So far, it is a conscript for a natural language. I haven't seen evidence that
it is more.
Know to little for a definite judgement on *this* case.
If someone publishes books in that script, for example, and can point to
significant sales - that's use.
There's my Nyctographic Alice. There's a whole rake of Japanese scripts.
Books, plural, preferably some corpus. Not a demonstration (like the
barcode Alice :) )
The reason for encoding is to allow digitization of texts - and the reason for
*standardization* of this encoding is that text are shared by a significant
user community whether concurrently (as in living scripts) or asynchronously
(as in dead scripts).
Try to remember that I know this, Asmus.
As this is a general discussion I do word things differently from when I
would be discussing the same thing with you exclusively. This sentence
is general background to allow others to follow my thoughts. If you
agree, you may skip it.
Shopping lists or handwritten class notes still don't enter, unless they lead
to digital documents.
The whole structure of this writing system appears to be too complex for people
to use at speed. If they can't use it at speed, then either they will give it
up, or they will modify it, and it, like Bamum and others, will evolve into
something that *is* practical.
That is, a presumption that it is not "stable". If, however unwieldy,
it's demonstrably used widely, then what?
This is definitely a go-slow script, precisely because it is clearly not very
practical.
Getting the facts established is always good.
A./
