Stefan Persson or someone said...
>> Is there any chance that Tengwar and Cirth might become parts of the UCS? I
>> know that they have been proposed for inclusion, but all proposed characters
>> don't have to be included in the standard...
>
>Of the insiders, some are strongly for it and have said so, some are
>strongly against it and have said so.
And Michael Everson said:
> Who's strongly against it? They're perfectly valid scripts. They
> represent a corpus of literary data which is studied and published.
Well, I'm sort of halfway out in the rain anyway, so I'll go on record
once more with my opinion.
I do not, in principle, oppose the inclusion of Cirth & Tengwar in Unicode
or 10646. Everson is right about their use. (He's also right about those
being more "useful" in some sense than the dead users of Meroitic, but I'm
only talking living scripts for now.)
I think there are some important scripts for "us" to encode before we
worry about serving such hobbyists. On the one hand some people will say,
well, selling software pays our salaries so we should encode whatever stuff
is fashionable this month and helps us sell stuff. On the other hand, some
people will say, yeah but we also have an important responsibility to
living minority communities whose scripts are not yet encoded. My
sympathies are with the latter.
If a script disappears because the community who uses it decides that it's
not worth using since no software supports it (or ever will support it),
that would be a sad situation. I would rather lose a few dollars from the
Cirth & Tengwar enthusiasts -- who are probably all basking in the riches
of industrialized countries and have their fonts and their fast CPUs anyway
-- than go down in history as part of the doltish generation that ignored
oodles of underprivileged minority scripts to their respective extinctions.
We should be encoding important stuff that will be a boost to endangered
cultures and languages -- to preserve those cultures, languages, and
literatures; and to have a long-lasting importance. Then when we're all
done with that, we can break for recess & play LOTR games on the beach.
Rick
