On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 21:06, Ali A Khanban wrote: > Well, I am afraid that may cause some problems in the future, especially > some ugly political ones. Let me tell you a story. The first time we > tried to approach High Council of Informatics "showraaye aaliye > anformaatik" to discuss a Unicode proposal, they were against using > Unicode, just because the letters were named "Arabic letter ...". They > were of course mistaken, and it took a long time and effort to achieve > their support. I am sure Roozbeh still remembers those times.
Sure I do. But the times are now different. There are new organizations, like the Language and Computer Council at the Persian Academy and the Technical Council of the Persian Language at Supreme Council of ICT. These new councils, filled with linguists and technologists, now understand the issue: they need a better name than just "khatt-e faarsi", and they call it "khatt-e arabi". They have also seen what Unicode has done for them on the web, and now see that names of technical things better be not a matter of nationalistic pride. > Now, first of all, we do not talk about script family. Everyone agrees > that Persian script belongs to the Arabic scripts family. We just say > "Persian script", and in a note we explain that this script belongs to > the Arabic scripts family. Please note that unlike western scripts that > can be called Latin script, there are many national and political > barriers and dilemmas, which prevent the nations on this side of the > world to call their script Arabic script. Choosing a very liberal, and > somehow radical, approach at the moment doesn't solve all of them! Well, it all seems that we are talking about different things when we use the term "script". I guess if we define the thing we are talking about in the document, things may get much easier. > Secondly, as I mentioned before, we clearly have in the constitution > that the name of both language and script are Farsi. If we provide a > document that will become official and in which refer to our script as > Arabic (no matter how we explain it in a note), that surely will have > some side-effects. This document is not official. It is a "recommendation" of Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc., and will only be a requirement of the Persian Linux project at the High Council of Informatics. roozbeh _______________________________________________ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
