Jill Ramonsky wrote...See http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Klingon/piqad.html for some discussion on this from Nick Nicholas. He makes some of the same points: dozens of scripts out there are used more in transliteration than in native form, by scholars. Who *writes* in Linear B? People write in transliterations of it.
It seems to me that if 0x110000 codepoints isn't a big enough space to fit in the Klingon alphabet (and other alphabets which were similarly rejected) then we need more codepoints. Simple as that.
Rejection of Klingon has *absolutely* nothing to do with space. Jill quoted, but apparently did not *read* a statement (ostensibly from KLI but apparently only existing in a FAQ from a mail list not on the kli.org site). Let me quote again, the relevant point:
Klingon was rejected, but it failed because its potential users don't use it.
Note, too, that Klingon's PUA is used in jbovlaste (http://www.lojban.org/jbovlaste/natlang/listing.html?lang=i-klingon).
I have to confess, I personally would like to see a way to access the higher planes somehow, eventually (e.g. hyper-surrogates or something). But your argument is correct. Basically, an (effectively) infinite space assignable at will by anyone is what we had already, before computers were invented. Anyone could make up glyphs, and every writing system in fact did. But it gets impossible to keep track of all of them.In such a system no application need ever be rejected, for any reason.
Inclusion would be automatic for every submission.
Who will write software to keep track of all that? Sorry, but that notion is economically preposterous. If anyone anytime can make a new character and have it automatically added to the standard, you don't have a very stable standard, you have a bunch of competing private uses, and nobody from one moment to the next has any idea what is actually in the standard or how it relates to anything else. (The notion is anti-communicative and entirely against the trend of history which, in all civilizations I know of in all time periods has tended toward greater standardization, not less.) The chaos of such a free-for-all would probably end up working itself out into a series of private agreements among user groups and industry cartels... Soon someone would get the bright idea of defining a circumscribed subset so more people could have some hope of communicating. And then we would be right back in Unicode land.
~mark
