Peter Kirk scripsit:
But have the others agreed with his judgments because they are convinced of their correctness? Or is it more that the others have trusted the judgments of the one they consider to be an expert, and have either not dared to stand up to him or have simply been unqulified to do so?
This is laughable.
Well, John, you yourself wrote only yesterday:
I think "the rest of you" was intended to refer to the UTC, and "his" is certainly Michael's. So, I was asking for an explanation of what you wrote. I suggested two or three possible explanations. If there is another one which I have missed, please tell me what it is. Surely it is not laughable that "the others have trusted the judgments of the one they consider to be an expert, and have ... been unqualified to" offer other judgments. Indeed I would be pretty certain that this is quite close to the truth. And it is a reasonable position considering that the UTC members are not all script experts. The problem arises only if they listen to one expert only and ignore other expert opinions.If the rest of you hadn't agreed with his judgments most of the time, the Roadmap might look quite different.
It amazes me that all of the existing scripts have apparently been encoded without any properly documented justification apart from one expert's unchallenged judgments.
It would be amazing if it were true, but of course it's absolutely false.
I am glad to hear it. Are these properly documented justifications on the public record? Should I expect to find them in the appropriate sections of proposals made to WG2? The justification is certainly lacking in N2746, as Michael has more or less admitted.
And these two cases are hardly a good advertisement for the expert's
reputation. The Coptic/Greek unification proved to be ill-advised and is
being undone. As for the unified W and Q, well, I guess that if the
Kurds and others who use these letters in Cyrillic knew how this
decision would mean that their alphabet will never be sorted correctly
(unless they get round to tailoring their collations), they would make a
strongly argued case for disunification.
Nobody writes Kurdish in Cyrillic any more: it's a historic use of the
script only.
Really? Have you asked the Kurdish community living in central Russia, and in Armenia? They were certainly using Cyrillic only four or five years ago when I met some of them and saw a newly printed book in Cyrillic and Latin script. It would rather surprise me if they have all abandoned it completely in such a short time. If you like I will get back in contact and check up on the details.
In any event, Michael had *nothing* to do with those unifications.
He has consistently pressed for disunification (rightly, IMHO).
Thanks for the clarification. I accept that I don't know all of the history, and so I was assuming that what you said was correct, that Michael's judgments had been accepted on most such issues.
This sounds like verbal sniping to me. Those who want to disunify CJK may not be the majority, and their position may have been been rejected by the UTC (so far - if they could post facto disunify Coptic, in principle they could disunify CJK), but their position is not absurd, and more than Michael's position on Coptic or Phoenician is absurd.
Well, perhaps the expert can
feel how much his fingers have been burned by over-unification and so is
now pressing for everything to be disunified.
Nonsense, and insulting nonsense to boot. Michael has never pressed for either total unification or total disunification, because both positions are absurd, and his position is never absurd. (I may disagree with it from time to time, and I am willing to press him for reasons, but I *always* respect his point of view.)
This verbal sniping on a subject (the history of character encoding) you know nothing about is beneath you. Try and do better.
And then there is the matter of CJK unification, which I gather is still
rather contentious.
Only among the invincibly ignorant.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
