Mike Ayers asked: > I agree with those who think that interleaving Phoenician ad Hebrew > would not be a good default. I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: is > it not correct that language scholars are those most likely to be able to > create and use a nondefault sort order?
They would be the most likely to be able to *specify* what particular kind of behavior they were looking for. They might, however, as John suggests, be completely unable to figure out how to implement their desired specification computationally and not have enough money to be able to pay someone competent to do so. However, I think the middle ground we should aim for here is to facilitate the development of applications for sorting based on tools like ICU which have *reasonably* easy mechanisms for specifying arbitrarily complex custom sorting behavior. That would give scholars a chance to make use of such tools without having to give up their field for extended periods of time to become sufficiently talented programming geeks to implement the behavior they are after. After all, the implementation of script folding in the ICU framework is not exactly rocket science. It is effectively the moral equivalent of 22 lines of the following sort: 05CD=E000 ; Hebrew aleph primary equal to Phoenician alp etc., read by the ICU API's to specify a tailoring. People agitating to have Hebrew and Phoenician conflated together in the *default* Unicode collation element table may be overlooking the fact that it is very unlikely that the default table is going to produce optimal sorting, as required for Semiticists, of Hebrew data, anyway -- it is just a default, "reasonable" ordering for Hebrew. Scholars will probably need to tweak it, particularly for points, accents, punctuation-like marks, maybe some symbols, and so on. In that context, deciding whether or not to conflate Hebrew square script and Phoenician (~ Old Canaanite, or whatever we end up calling it) in primary order just becomes part of the overall task of coming up with *optimal* collations for particular scholastic requirements. Also, keep the following in mind when considering exceptions to the default conventions for the default primary ordering of scripts in the DUCET: It is rather easier to tailor a *conflation* of two scripts that are separated in the default table, than it is to tailor a *separation* of two scripts which are conflated in the default table. Either is doable, of course, but the latter requires *more* knowledge of how to do tailoring and how to avoid pitfalls in tailoring than the former does. --Ken
