At 08:22 3/14/2002, Michael Everson wrote:
>Nonsense. Contempt and ridicule by whom? The millions and millions of
>readers worldwide of Tolkien's work who admire and appreciate his literary
>and linguistic achievement? Or by some dour-faced accountant Marley
>chained to his stockholders' interests?
I think a good deal of contempt and ridicule would come from those
individuals, companies and associations who already disapprove of Unicode
as an encoding standard and are pushing other universal encodings or
insisting that national encodings are superior. I don't think that such
contempt and ridicule is necessarily something that should bother us, but I
also don't think wide-spread admiration for Tolkien is going to inhibit
such contempt and ridicule. Personally, I think Tolkien is highly overrated
as a writer, which is not to say that I didn't enjoy his books or don't
admire the breadth of his knowledge, but in every year since I read the
_Lord of the Rings_ I have read more interesting and better written books
by other people. I am concerned, though, that at the end of the day the
phrase 'Unicode is a plain text computer encoding standard that includes
languages spoken by Elves' *sounds* daft, even if we eventually reckon it
not to be.
What this suggests to me is that, if the Tolkien scripts are ever to be
included, they need to be done so with explicit reference to the use of
these scripts in the kind of scholarly publications to which Michael
refers. Which is to say that I don't think these scripts are
self-justifying in the way that scripts of non-fictional origin are. If
they are to be encoded, then the reasons for the encoding need to be stated
very clearly, so as not to hand Unicode's detractors a club with which to
beat us.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
... es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit,
das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich
nicht in ihm gemeint erkannte.
... every image of the past that is not recognized by the
present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin
