John Hudson said: > 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.
All a matter of astute marketing. If we have to get down to this level of detail, it would be: "Unicode is a plain text computer encoding standard that includes the writing systems for [first list enough "respectable" world languages to bedazzle the most bottomline-minded skeptic] as well as Tengwar, a writing system used by professors of Modern and Old English to write Quenya poetry published in refereed journals." > 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. Just turn the argument. The Unicode Consortium encodes them because an academic community has deemed them worthy of use and publication, and needs a character encoding for transmission, word processing, web publication -- all the usual reasons that apply just as well to Avestan or Aramaic. If someone wants to come beating with a club, cite the boilerplate "academic use" policy and politely invite them to go beat up on the academics who think writing and studying poetry in Quenya or other Elvish languages is academically respectable. Maybe they'll get their grants cancelled. Oh wait..., humanities scholars don't get grants in the first place. *hehe* --Ken P.S. I suggest that all this is a matter of preconceptions and prejudicial opinions among certain rather dour types about what is "worthy" of serious attention and what is not. The Tolkien Elvish languages have both the great fortune and simultaneous misfortune of having elegant constructed scripts for their writing. If Tolkien had been satisfied with simply writing them using the Latin alphabet, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all, because nobody would care if some scholars of Old English went off and wrote Quenya poetry using *Latin* letters. But why should beautiful, high-minded lyrics in the constructed Quenya language be inherently any less worthy of study than other topics that get serious scholastic attention? For example, see: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/8/8-1208.html where serious linguistic scholars sink their teeth into Pig Latin (igpay atinlay), Egg Latin (eggegg leggateggin), flip-top (e hot o lot-squared "hello"), Oppish (umopbopropeloplopa "umbrella"), French "verlan" (< "e l'envers"), and Japanese babibubebo (abaibisubukuburibiibimubu "ice cream"). Now you *must* admit that *that* is really serious stuff that it is truly worth all our time and investments to have encoded Latin letters and Japanese hiragana in Unicode to record for posterity!!
