2012/8/23 Rick McGowan <[email protected]> > ** > Jameson, Michael, et al - > > OK, I'm going to join in here before this goes much further. (And as usual > on this list I'm writing as an individual, and this is only my personal > opinion.) > > You are always welcome to put forward a proposal for whatever you want to > see encoded. I'm happy to receive serious proposals, and in my experience, > the committee is generally happy to look at them. > > But when you ask the question and make the observations below, my simple > answer would be that you don't see any problem because you haven't been > sitting in the character encoding committees for 20+ years to observe how > things "gang aft agley" as they say. >
To get all of Mayan into Unicode is a very heavy undertaking. It will take a serious combination of linguistic, technical, archaeological, and bureaucratic skill and knowledge, as well as some creativity. And once it's done, it will take further years to show real benefits. Sure, scholars will use it right away, but only to do essentially the same things they were doing already; only after a while will that everyday use lead to enough of a corpus of encoded Mayan to provide fruitful fodder for hidden Makov models and the like, in ways that couldn't have been done with an ad-hoc encoding. This delayed benefit, thus, further reduces the impulse to take on the task in the first place. So it could easily be 15, 20, or more years before (most of) Mayan is finally accepted into Unicode. In that time, millions of children here in the Mayan area and around the world will be taught to read and write basic Mayan numbers. A significant fraction of those children will have access to computers. It is a basic role of Unicode to facilitate those computers being able to handle those glyphs for those children. When I said "I don't see how we could end up regretting having encoded the digits", I absolutely did not mean that I couldn't imagine having to revisit the issue. It is entirely possible that eventually there will be a variety of code points for various forms and/or orientations of the digits. It's even possible that there will be glyphs or glyph elements which don't have a canonical standalone form, but are only modifiers or only a set of variant possibilities. That will not be the case for the numerals. Because of the modern uses I have pointed out — primary and secondary education, and page numbers in mayan-oriented books; though I'm sure there are others — we know today that there will be a need for simple, standalone versions of the numerals. That's what I meant by "we won't regret it": that the numbers will be useful today; that it's possible (I'd say likely) they'll be useful in the broader scheme for encoding classical inscriptions and post-classical codices; and that even if they aren't useful, there's essentially zero chance that using up 20 codepoints today will make the difference between the future utopian Mayan encoding scheme fitting into its currently-assigned block or not. Is it possible that, today, we'd make the wrong choice about some bit of metadata? Of course it is, although if we're responsible about making educated guesses. Is it possible we'd bitterly regret that mistake? I really don't see why. If the numerals assigned now are called SIMPLE MAYAN DIGIT 3, or MODERNIZED MAYAN HIEROGLYPH 3, or whatever, instead of just MAYAN 3, in order to future-proof against the possibility of having to call the later fixed version CLASSICAL MAYAN PETROGLYPH 3 to avoid a collision, then that's fine. So for me, the question of "should this be inside the block set aside for Mayan, or somewhere else" is reasonable, if secondary. But the idea that it's best just to wait... I can't sympathize. > > In my opinion, the UTC would be irresponsible to approve the encoding for > a set of digits for a complicated system like Mayan without even having a > preliminary script proposal on record; and without any involvement of the > actual serious scholars in the field. > As I said at the outset, I would not even consider making this proposal without discussing it with the Guatemalan ALMG. This body may not include the majority of serious scholars in the field of Mayan archaeology or epigraphy, but it certainly is one of the primary authoritative institutions on Mayan linguistics. > > No matter what you say about how safe it is, well... I wouldn't tend to > believe that without firm evidence, which means -- at least -- someone > having done significant work on the whole script in the context of a > character encoding proposal to prove it. And given a lot of the other > questions and speculation in your recent e-mail, I'm inclined to think that > yes, you aren't an expert and probably don't have enough clear answers to > detailed questions, as required to convince a committee. > It is not my desire or my place to develop, or even to midwife, a full proposal for Mayan. I raised several issues without fully resolving them because I believed it was the responsible thing to acknowledge the complexity of the issues involved. I think that, despite that complexity, the potential usefulness of the numeric characters now, not in two decades or so, is real. > > In any case: you're welcome to write up a proposal for Mayan digits and > give your opinions and findings. It would not be a waste of time to do so. > But I would expect the outcome to be that the committee would set it aside > and eventually pass it along to the scholars who end up working on the > actual proposal for the Mayan script. At that time, it would be a valuable > input document. > I think our definitions of "waste of time" may differ. I understand that this all takes time — years, even — but I don't think it's worth it if it doesn't speed anything up at all. Jameson
