Michael Everson wrote: > Of course, to echo the observation John Hudson made regarding the > Masonic Hebrew and Samaritan text, the text presented here > http://www.crowndiamond.org/cd/genesis.html shows that Palaeo-Hebrew > should obviously unified with Latin.
Instead of taking dogmatic positions on how proto-semitics scripts should be encoded, why not leaving this work to the people that will really use these scripts and are currently working with those texts and publishing them? It seems that there are much enough people working there without needing to oppose to all what they have to say. Could you instead take the time to work on the missing Latin letters for African languages? Why isn't there any serious work about these living languages that don't have lot of universitary support and nearly no computer resources in Africa to make this job? There are lots of work there to work with specifications, work with simple 8-bit encodings that could be mapped easily to Unicode and usable on low-cost computers, and some agreements to seek with these African communities so that they will finally get keyboards, fonts and applications that will fit their urgent need for litteracy support in poor country (producing books for these languages is too much expensive in those poor countries, and they need a way to automate this to allow developping education in those countries, as well as acess to culture in their language, with translations of their work). These millions of African people merit respect even if their culture is not aided by their government which sometimes refuses any help to develop native languages face to official ones (like French, English, Arabic). You get people learn happily other cultures if they are not offered first the legitimate right to learn and use their own culture, i.e. their native languages and scripts. In many cases, African languages would be better served if the Latin characters needed for their languages were added and specified in accurate lists, so that systems could be developped to use and interchange these languages, and fonts could be augmented by typographers like you with the support of the missing few glyphs. There is still interesting work to do within the Latin and Arabic scripts. It's a shame that someone like you invest so much in an area that would better be specified by other communities. You can keep your right of criticizing their work, or specify some formalism if you need it. But please avoid dogmatic attitutes, simply because people in this list do not have the same formalism as the one you created. Thanks. Philippe. __________________________________________________________________ << ella for Spam Control >> has removed Spam messages and set aside Newsletters for me You can use it too - and it's FREE! http://www.ellaforspam.com
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