Peter Kirk wrote:
On 22/05/2004 19:41, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
Peter Kirk wrote:
The fear is rather that a few people, who are not true Semitic scholars, will embrace the new range, and by doing so will make things much harder for the majority who don't need and don't want the new encoding. One of the original purposes of Unicode was to move away from the old situation in which many different incompatible encodings were used for the same language and script. We don't want to get back into that situation.
That's awfully elitist, isn't it? "Some *non*-scholars want it (if they'll embrace it, it follows that they'd want it if offered), but we can't be swayed by the desires of the hoi polloi." Non-scholars get to use Unicode too, and have a right to influence what gets in it. Just because the userbase isn't the people you thought it would be doesn't mean they don't count.
My intention here is not elitist but democratic, to consider the requirements of the majority of people who actually use the scripts in question. Hoi polloi (Greek: the majority) don't actually use Phoenician script. Semitic scholars do. A rather small number of other people do. I am suggesting that we look for the views of the majority of those who actually use the script. And of the views expressed on this list by actual users, or reported here with specific names and details, I see a majority for unifying Phoenician with Hebrew. In fact I think only two actual users have favoured non-unification, Deborah Anderson and George Khalaf, plus Michael if he is really a user himself. But several users, Semitic scholars, have favoured unification.
We've been through this: it isn't about who's the majority. If the majority wants one thing and there is a significant *minority* that wants the other, Unicode has to go with the minority. Otherwise we'd just all stick with US-ASCII. Unicode is supposed to be universal, not a servant of the majority alone.
You can't have it both ways: if, as you admit, there are likely to be a fair number of people who will use Phoenician--people, not necessarily scholars with publications in all the right journals--that indicates that there *is* a potential userbase, and thus there are people who would be served by it. The fact that there are people who would be served by it indicates that Unicode should provide it. That there are other people who would not be served by it is neither here nor there.
...
I don't think the "majority vs. one or two malcontents" picture that you're drawing here is even vaguely reminiscent of reality.
I don't claim an overwhelming majority. But even if it is only four to three, that is still a majority.
Four to three is an excellent reason to listen to the three. Or else we could all just take a vote and see if CJK or Latin should be the *only* alphabet we encode. After all, the others are just minorities. And you're telling me you're not being elitist? Listen to yourself.
Besides, this is hardly a representative sampling. I'm sure both sides could find more supporters; nobody's polled the entire pool of Semiticists in the world (and even if they had, as you said yourself, there are non-Semiticists who will use Phoenician--*and their needs must be considered too*). There is no reason to believe that the minuscule sample we've seen in any way reflects the actual division of opinion, except that we *can* assume that our informants do not speak only for themselves and thus there is at least some support on both sides of the issue.
I can't believe you're saying that four scholars vs. three scholars means we have to disregard the needs of the three; I'm completely flabbergasted by that.
Anyway, didn't you yourself say that once you heard from Deborah Anderson, you saw that there was in fact a need for this, and that removed your objections to the proposal? Why the change of position?
~mark
