On the other hand, if you asked him nicely, Mark might find the more marked form, NFD, to his liking, especially since it is likely to contain more combining marks. Mark is definitely in favor of markedness. I, on the other hand, am definitely in favor of kennings, but we have found little practical or architectural use for them in the Unicode character-sea.
Zihai! Such kennings abound in our work; Lee Collins and I were only yesterday discussing the Wenhai dictionary of Tangut.
==== From http://www.mirabilis.ca/archives/2003_11.html
Whistling language on the Canary Islands
Near-Extinct 'Whistling Language' Returns. From an Associated Press article at Yahoo:
SAN SEBASTIAN, Canary Islands - Juan Cabello takes pride in not using a cell phone or the Internet to communicate. Instead, he puckers up and whistles.
Cabello is a "silbador," until recently a dying breed on tiny, mountainous La Gomera, one of Spain's Canary Islands off West Africa. Like his father and grandfather before him, Cabello, 50, knows "Silbo Gomero," a language that's whistled, not spoken, and can be heard more than two miles away.
This chirpy brand of chatter is thought to have come over with early African settlers 2,500 years ago. Now, educators are working hard to save it from extinction by making schoolchildren study it up to age 14.
Silbo - the word comes from Spanish verb silbar, meaning to whistle - features four "vowels" and four "consonants" that can be strung together to form more than 4,000 words. It sounds just like bird conversation and Cabello says it has plenty of uses.
=====
It is sad to hear that such wonderful forms of communication are waning. But an appropriate kenning for someone who works against the Silbo's saggings might be "Keen Sing Bearer".
(ducks) -- My Clever Son * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
