From: "Michael Everson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > At 17:36 +0300 2003-11-10, Alexander Savenkov wrote: > >"The Wrong Thing To Do" can be seen everywhere in the newspapers when > >the names and some other words originally written in Cyrillic and > >other scripts are letter-by-letter (mapped?) transliterated to the > >resulting script. > > That's transliteration, which is different.
What other solution will you find for standardizing the Tifinagh script, when it clearly appears that glyphs are not relevant for the character identity? (1) May be a system similar to ISCII where characters are coded by their function rather than their glyph? This is what has been suggested in the Tifinagh encoding proposal. It has the caveat that several sets of glyphs are needed to represent the same codepoints according to cultural conventions, and the additional problem that no convention actually has glyphs that cover the whole abstract character set. The code coverage however is complete with character names, to which an unambiguous accentuated Latin letter is immediately accessible. This is in that model that Latin letters would be used as possible glyphs for the script. (2) Or a codepoint assignment for each representative glyph? The problem would be to name the code points unambiguously (and thus: which cultural convention will this name adopt?) This model corresponds more or less to the solution used when creating fonts, as a collection of symbols, independantly of their actual meaning. The problem is that it becomes difficult to interchange texts encoded with each script variant. But if this correspond to the script usage for a particular language, and no language uses distinct variants simultaneously, this could be a good solution. However the character properties will be difficult to define (do they all encode letters or syllables?)... (3) Or a code point assignment for each (name,glyph) pair ? This solution would create multiple code points with the same representative glyph but distinct names, and multiple code points with the same basic name or function but distinct glyphs. For this case, the chosen Unicode name should be qualified by the name of its cultural convention (which one? the name of the author who published that convention?) (4) Or a set of separate scripts? This would create separate blocks for each Tifinagh variant, deunified but with a clear assignment between the glyph and its meaning, but would require more codepoints. Here it becomes possible to identify the language and script and work on its semantics, with precise character properties. This model would correspond to the solution adopted when mapping the scripts previously unified in ISCII into Unicode with separate code points in separate blocks. Here also the name to use for each script block is not clear... Fondamentally, the solutions (3) and (4) are nearly equivalent, but solution (3) is more compact and mixes the same number of code points into a unique block, which would have less "holes".
