At 12:25 -0700 2001-07-06, Michael \(michka\) Kaplan wrote:
>While fully recognizing the importance of Middle Earth to some people it is
>difficult for me to get past the fact that there Middle Earth has no
>national representative to WG2?
Neither did Old Italic, which was sponsored by Ireland and the
Unicode Consortium. Not, you know, Italy.
>And the same people who push so hard for these scripts may never know why it
>is so hard to find experts for other scripts who are willing to help.
>Perhaps those experts just did not want their scripts to be given equal
>footing with those of the _Elvish Linguistic Fellowship_ or similar
>organizations?
Michka, the only thing I can say is "nonsense". You've given no
evidence whatsoever that any particular group eschewed Unicode
because it had scripts in it they didn't like. Some members of WG2
complained that there were too many minority scripts roadmapped, to
which only one answer could be given: "be happy that your script
needs are met, and remember that others' rights to their scripts are
just as important as yours". The UCS is, indeed, intended to be
Universal, and there's no getting around that.
Sometimes it's hard to find Nabataean experts because there aren't
very many, and a lot of traditional philologists don't use e-mail.
Sometimes the real experts are dead (like Lytkin, who published
definitively on Old Permic). I can't think of a case where anyone
said, "oh, we can't bother with Unicode because they plan to encode
Tengwar".
>You can just call me a consciencious objector to having anyone who
>subscribes to "Vinyar Tengwar" considering themselves to be among the
>Númenoreans (a.k.a. the Dúnedain), who alone of all the races of Men knew
>Elvish tongues. :-)
Most subscribers think of themselves as linguists interested in
having a bit of fun.
--
Michael Everson
