Sampo Syreeni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 has just articulated my favorite argument about so-called "artificial" scripts. All writing systems are created by man; they do not occur in nature, like mountains and trees and cats, even if some symbols began as pictures of mountains and trees and cats. Trying to isolate certain writing systems as "artificial" is a dead-end proposition. It is possible, of course, to isolate certain writing systems as having been created in support of a work of literary fiction. However, if I may quote from Unicode 3.1 (UAX #27): "The Gothic script was devised in the fourth century by the Gothic bishop, Wulfila (311-383 CE), to provide his people with a written language and a means of reading his translation of the Bible. Written Gothic materials are largely restricted to fragments of Wulfila's translation of the Bible; these fragments are of considerable importance in New Testament textual studies. The chief manuscript, kept at Uppsala, is the Codex Argenteus or 'the Silver Book,' which is partly written in gold on purple parchment." Without stepping on anyone's faith, it seems that the line isn't too clear here, either. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
