Peter Kirk scripsit: > This reminds me of the polytonic Greek issue. If I understand correctly, > the Greek government decided to do away with the distinction between > accents because this was easier to implement with 1960's computers.
I find that hard to believe, to say the least. Surely ease of learning and of use for Greeks was the paramount concern, since the distinctions encoded by the different accents have been dead for more than a millennium. Imagine if anglophones spoke their language as they do today, but wrote it in their best rendering of Anglo-Saxon: saying ["wVtSu"sejIz"tr\u] and writing "So� is ��t �u segst!", or even worse saying [t@ di"bVg] and writing "wyrmbeslean". > Unicode was forced to backtrack and add a whole extra block for > polytonic Greek. The block in question is not at all required for polytonic Greek support, and was forced on Unicode by its appearance in the pre-Unicode 10646 draft standard. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ccil.org/~cowan http://www.reutershealth.com Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to prove Rudyard Kipling's theory that the mongoose first came to India on a raft from Polynesia. --blurb for _Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi_
