From: "Patrick Andries" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > In this condition, why couldn't Latin glyphs be among > > these, when they already have the merit of covering the whole abstract > > character set covered by all scripts in the Tifinagh family? > > Because it is best to use Tifinagh glyphs as representative glyphs of the > Tifinagh script?
No: the simple reason is the choice of the "representative" glyph, which will probably be accurate for one cultural convention but completely wrong with another, as that glyph represent another phoneme coded at a different place where another "representative" glyph is used, which may also be wrong. Look at the phonemic meaning of the glyph that looks like two triangles, pointing top and bottom to each other. Look at the glyph which looks like a moon crescent (open on right side) with a dot in the middle... Which phonemic value do they have? This depends on cultural conventions, and it really looks as if there was not _one_ but several distinct Tifinagh scripts using the same glyphs but with incompatible phonemic values... > But I agree that chosing the representative glyphs > may become a sensitive issue if the Tifinagh script is to be unified, each > school might feel offended that its preferred glyphs were not chosen in > ISO/IEC 10646. This does not necessarily mean that Tifinagh should be > encoded with an easy Latin mapping in mind. I'm just suggesting that if the phonemic encoding model is used, the choice of "representative" glyphs will create confusion, as it will privilegiate one interpretation of the glyphs and not the other one. Polemics are already present on the Internet because of the choice of interpretation that has been made by Morocco, which excludes other interpretations. So you won't avoid that users will need a way to better know which phoneme is represented by the codepoint. One can of course look at the assigned character names, but it will be less polemic if the Tifinagh script is standardized with several charts showing the relevant glyphs for each represented culture (some squares in the charts will be blank, or just showing the hexadecimal codepoint which is not used in each culture, and Berber readers will still need to see there where they also write a Latin glyph, when they want to communicate with the common Latin transliteration.)
