William Overington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If the decision were made to encode synthetic scripts into Unicode, is the > idea to put them into plane 0 or into one of the other planes or some into > plane 0 and some into other planes please?
Do we even have an appropriate working definition of "synthetic script"? Without one, the discussion is totally moot. The closest I can come is something like "a script that was invented, generally by one person and in a relatively short period of time, rather than evolving from existing scripts in a gradual and progressive manner." But right away that definition includes not only Shavian, Tengwar, Cirth, Klingon, and most of the contents of ConScript, but also Ethiopic, Cherokee, Canadian Syllabics, Gothic, Deseret, and maybe Yi Syllabics, all of which are already encoded in Unicode. An alternative working definition of "synthetic script" that means "one invented to support a work of fiction" would be inappropriately aimed at the Star Trek and Tolkein scripts. I still believe that separating writing systems into a "natural" or "real" category and an "artificial" or "fictional" or "synthetic" category is much less straightforward than those labels imply. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
