Re: Rare extinct latin letters

[Jim Allan]

For odd and extinct characters or special alphabets, pending any actual 
coding by Unicode, it might be more desireable to treat them as a 
cyphers for the extended Latin alphabet rather than encoding them in the 
PUA.

For example, if someone is using a character for the _ng_ sound in 
_singer_ then encode it as eng, lowercase U+014B, uppercase U+014A, 
regardless of its appearance.

A special font would be needed to view the charactes correctly, but that 
is also true if the shapes are encoded in the PUA.

The advantage to treating such alphabets as cyphers is that a user with 
some knowledge of IPA can read material written in them without having 
to learn the characters, but can also see the original appearance of the 
text simply by switching a font.

Greek characters and Cyrillic characters might also be used.

Some of the matching might be rather arbitrary.

But there are doubtless thousands of various revisions of the Latin 
alphabet and invented scripts out there, most of which were scarcely or 
at all used by any but their inventors (as well as cypher systems like 
Morse Code and signal flags).

There seems to me little to be gained from Unicode attempting to encode 
every one of these separately (along with any new systems people might 
invent.)

Shavian, for example, might well have been encoded as an IPA cypher, 
simply by providing a cross-reference between Shavian character and 
Unicode IPA character.

If a large amount of Shavian were to be placed on the web, and I wished 
to investigate it, I would probably create an IPA type font with 
appropriate IPA glyphs assigned to Unicode Shavian values, so I could 
investigate the material more easily without having to learn the Shavian 
script.

Similarly with some syllabic systems I might create a Latin letter font 
with Lattin letter digraphs replacing the syllabic characters.

Indeed, a Latin letter only Unicode font covering many non-Latin scripts 
might be quite useful, if one could get used to reading the words 
spelled backwards in Hebrew and Arabic, along with superscript and 
subscript vowels.

Jim Allan