On 27 Aug 2012, at 00:21, Richard Wordingham wrote:

> We do where the properties necessitate, e.g. U+0241 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER 
> GLOTTAL STOP and U+0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP,

Those are not duplicate characters. There is a case-pairing glottal stop and a 
non-casing glottal stop. That is a functional difference. 

> or the NEW TAI LUE and TAI THAM scripts.  

These are not duplicate scripts. (And no, I'm not interested in debating this 
with you.)

> We also have the principal of the separation of scripts.

I do not think it is wise to encode some "neo-Mayan" number system because some 
magazines have used them decoratively in foliation or because some 
school-children spend a cultural week or two doing Mayan maths before getting 
back to regular decimal algebra and geometry. That is not a sufficient usage 
scenario to rush forward with an encoding. 

I believe that it would be prudent to avoid encoding these numbers until the 
entire script has been examined properly. 

Preliminary work I did in 1998 on Mayan turned up nearly 1200 characters. 44 of 
these were calendrical. 20 were numeric. It would be foolish to risk a mistaken 
encoding of this important script in a rush to encode 5% of the whole just 
because that 5% *seems* to someone to be "safe". He doesn't know if it's safe 
or not. 

We owe it to Mayan civilization past and present to do a proper job here. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/



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