On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, John Cowan wrote: >1) Involving Unicode with That Elvish Stuff will bring it into contempt >and ridicule. We don't need this.
It will also bring visibility to Unicode work, and goodwill on behalf of the synthetic language/script community. It offers us the possibility of marketing Unicode as What Makes Elvish Work. >2) The people who want Elvish encodings are only doing it for the hell >of it, and can very well carry on with kludges at one level or another. >They don't need this. So do we assume that "doing it for a need" is somehow better than "doing it for the hell of it"? This is a difficult line to draw, since having newly created/encoded scripts to play with is a serious need to people who like to play with such things. Furthermore, one might say there is no reason to encode anything beyond the basic set of unified ideographs -- keeping anything but a single script alive is already "doing it for the hell of it". It would seem like any reasoning strong enough to get us out of this will have to bring practical/profitability reasons into the picture, and beyond that, Elvish simply sells. As does Klingon. >3) Life is too short to worry about fictional encodings. Nobody needs >this. I.e. an assumption is at work, here, telling us to disregard synthetic scripts as somehow inferior to "natural" ones. We might say, then, that any script purposefully built (vs. decentrally evolved) is not suitable for encoding. If I'm not mistaken, this would exclude quite a number of writing systems. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
