MichKa wrote:
> It seems both of you missed the subtext here, and the reason that the
> attempt to introduce fictional scripts might cause consternation (the
> original point here)?
>
> The German ballot comments about Deseret were dismissed on the basis that it
> was not, in fact, a fictional script. Obviously a dismissal worded the same
> way for an actual fictional script would not be possible, and the resistance
> to fictional scripts will have to be directly addressed?
I've been lurking on this discussion, but have to chime in here. A
couple correspondents have pointed out the problems with the misnomer
"fictional script". Part of the reason, in my opinion, why we keep
going round and round on this topic is that the terminology itself
bends peoples' minds inappropriately.
I get the strong impression that for some people the argument seems to
go:
P: Fictional scripts should not be encoded in Unicode.
Q: Klingon, Tengwar, Cirth, (and Deseret, ...) are fictional scripts.
Therefore R: Klingon, Tengwar, Cirth should not be encoded in Unicode.
Simple and irrefutable, unless you deny both the premises and the
assertions of P and Q.
Everson pointed out (as have others) that *all* scripts are artifacts.
Some, like Latin and Greek, are cultural transmissions from earlier
forms, which gradually changed through use until they came to have
separate identities from their antecedents.
Others were more or less created on the spot, as it were, by a
single individual or group working intentionally on the creation
of an entire script. Of those, some, like Hangul, were magnificent successes,
and have come to see everyday use by millions of people. Some, like
Shavian, were magnificent failures, admired in the attempt, and
still used by small groups of enthusiasts, but of no significant
commercial or economic worth, and of marginal literary worth.
Some, like Tengwar, have taken a somewhat different path.
Tolkien constructed it for aesthetic and literary purposes,
and certainly never had the intent of someone like Shaw, to
use it for the reform or replacement of an existing orthography.
However, unlike Shavian, Tengwar has had a kind of organic success
of a sort, spreading in its aesthetic and literary realm, and
gaining a group of adherents. The fact that Tengwar is used to
express a language that itself was also consciously constructed
does not, as I see it, render it any less suitable for the purposes
it is intended and used. After all, the Latin script is also
used to express constructed languages such as Esperanto. I see
no *moral* distinction here, even if Tengwar is more often put
to the purpose of writing romantic nature poetry, whereas
Esperanto tends to discussions of world government. ;-)
And as I have said before, I see nothing inherently less worthwhile
in a well-constructed Elvish poem expressed in Tengwar than in
a warehouse record from Uruk expressed in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform.
Jenkins hit this nail on the head when he pointed out that
the basic Unicode criterion for coding-worthiness is the
existence of a significant group of people who wish to exchange
text in the script in question. We can quibble about what it means
to be a "significant" group in this context, and we certainly
should want to weigh factors such as how large a group, how
much text, and the costs of encoding and implementation versus
the needs. But I think it is just counterproductive to keep
obsessing on the imagined distinction of "fictional" versus
(what?) "real" status of the scripts in question.
Klingon (the pseudoscript) was rejected because it failed
the basic criterion for coding-worthiness, as well as a whole
list of other criteria that Rick listed in his document.
Tengwar is a completely different case. It meets all the
criteria, and is appropriate to have on the Roadmap. That doesn't
mean that it is a high priority -- in fact, as has been pointed
out, more energy has been spent gassing about it on this
list than has actually gone into encoding it. But in any
case I consider it inappropriate to keep labelling it a
"fictional" script. It is a real script and people use it.
If you want to toss around the term "fictional" script, I
suggest you apply it to things like Jindai, where we know
that a bunch of purported alphabets were simply hoaxes
invented to further political agendas. They were truly
fictional from the beginning, and weren't used except to
discuss the fake examples and make up more fake examples.
If *that* is what the term "fictional script" means, then,
yes, I agree that fictional scripts should not be encoded
in Unicode.
But if DIN (or somebody else) objects in the future to the
encoding of Tengwar "because it is a fictional script", then
I think the answer simply has to involve the rectification
of terms, since Tengwar is *not* a fictional script. And DIN
has no business objecting to the inclusion of a real script
that has a demonstrated body of users who wish to exchange
textual data on the Internet and by other means, using the
Universal Character Set, than they have any business objecting
to the inclusion of Cham, even if there happened to be no Cham
users in Germany.
--Ken
