Vladimir Ivanov noted: > Old Persian and Avestan are closely related ancient languages that usually > go side by side. If a linguist refers to an Old Persian example, he must > show its Avestan form or his work would be considered to be incomplete ...
[ lots of good information followed ] > > What is the critical number of users to cause an encoding of a script? One. ... if that critical user is someone like Michael Everson, who does the work to actually provide and document the proposal needed for the technical committees to evaluate and encode the script, and then pushes consideration of the proposal onto the committee agendas and works it through the required ballotting. There is no principled reason why Avestan and Old Persian should not be moving forward. They are known high-priority scripts for encoding -- they have been on the Unicode Roadmap for ages, for Plane 0 (BMP) in the case of Avestan, and for Plane 1 in the case of Old Persian Cuneiform. The members of the New (and Old) Scripts Committee of the Unicode Technical Committee are well aware of the fact that important bodies of literature (and holy texts) are recorded and Avestan and Old Persian, and that Avestan sees use even today. Preliminary proposals have been around for encoding both Avestan and Old Persian Cuneiform for a long time: http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1639/n1639.htm for Old Persian Cuneiform, 1997-09-18 (by Michael Everson) http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1684/n1684.htm for Avestan, 1998-01-18 (also by Michael Everson -- note a pattern here?) There has been discussion over the intervening years among Iranianists about the encoding proposals, but a consensus has not yet emerged among the academic specialists who would be needed to convince the UTC and WG2 that the proposals are mature for encoding. The proposals will likely languish until Michael Everson discovers he has some free time on his hands to pursue consensus with academic Iranianists and other interested parties, or until someone from that community emerges as a champion to push the proposals forward for the two years required to get them through the standardization process. --Ken
