Kenneth Whistler wrote:
A character encoding standard is an engineering construct,
> not a revelation of truth....
Amen.
I begin to suspect that part of the problem -- the problem of interminable debate, not any technical problem -- is due in part to different perceptions of the Unicode Standard. It must seem pretty obvious to engineers that this is a standard for encoding characters and that implementing support for the standard does not, per se, imply much of anything about how users should encode text. This is perhaps less obvious to non-engineers -- i.e. to users --, and understandably so given the typical representation of Unicode to this audience: 'Now supports all the world's major living languages!'. It is evident from the Phoenician discussion that a good number of people -- intelligent people, and experts in particular fields -- expect UTC decisions on what characters to encode to influence user decisions on how to encode specific texts. I don't think this expectation is unreasonable, given their perception of the standard, and perhaps Unicode needs to do a better job in conveying what the standard is and does and how it can be used.
There remains, in the Phoenician debate, much fuss about Unicode disunifying what a particular set of people consider to be the same thing. Perhaps the point needs to be made more strongly that for practical text processing purposes *unification or disunification of Phoenician and Palaeo-Hebrew happens only at the point of encoding a particular text*. There is no reason at all why Semiticists cannot simply totally ignore the proposed Phoenician block. The important question then, it seems to me, is not whether to encode Phoenician or not, but how to better communicate that the encoding of a particular set of characters does not mean that they have to be used to encode particular texts or languages.
John Hudson
