On 24 Mar 2017, at 11:34, Martin J. Dürst <due...@it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote: > > On 2017/03/23 22:48, Michael Everson wrote: > >> Indeed I would say to John Jenkins and Ken Beesley that the richness of the >> history of the Deseret alphabet would be impoverished by treating the 1859 >> letters as identical to the 1855 letters. > > Well, I might be completely wrong, but John Jenkins may be the person on this > list closest to an actual user of Deseret (John, please correct me if I'm > wrong one way or another).
He is. He transcribes texts into Deseret. I’ve published three of them (Alice, Looking-Glass, and Snark). > It may be that actual users of Deseret read these character variants the same > way most of us would read serif vs. sans-serif variants: I.e. unless we are > designers or typographers, we don't actually consciously notice the > difference. I am a designer and typographer, and I’ve worked rather extensively with a variety of Deseret fonts for my publications. They have been well-received. > If that's the case, it would be utterly annoying to these actual users to > have to make a distinction between two characters where there actually is > none. Actually neither of the ligature-letters are used in our Carrollian Deseret volumes. > The richness of the history of the Deseret alphabet can still be preserved > e.g. with different fonts the same way we have thousands of different fonts > for Latin and many other scripts that show a lot of rich history. You know, Martin, I *have* been doing this for the last two decades. I’m well aware of what a font is and can do. I’m also aware of what principles we have used for determining character identity. I saw your note about CJK. Unification there typically has something to do with character origin and similarity. The Deseret diphthong letters are clearly based on ligatures of *different* characters. Michael Everson
