Peter Kirk also wrote,
> But if there are two competing Unicode > encodings for the same text, and no defined mappings between them (as > both compatibility equivalence and interleaved collation seem to have > been ruled out), Surely a transliteration table is a mapping in every sense of the word. There's only 22 original letters involved. Even allowing for final forms of a few of the letters, it'd be an awfully small table and so easy to make! How hard is it to convert between Urdu (Arabic) and Punjabi (Gurmukhi)? How hard is it to convert from Sanskrit text in Unicode Devanagari to Sanskrit text in Unicode Bengali? > the advantages of going to Unicode are lost. Not at all. The advantage of encoding separate scripts separately (which is what Unicode does) is that they can all be stored in the same plain text documents without mark-up or loss of script identity. > Well, it's a lot more complex than this for searches, that's where the > basic problem will be. Searching for "Yahweh" won't find "Eloahim". And that's just Latin text. In the olden days (hearkening once again back to those antiquarian days of the century past) searching for "Upper Case" wouldn't find "upper case", either. But, things got better. You make a little program to generate "ABCDEF" into four different scripts (say, Latin Hebrew Phoenician Syriac), then paste the output into a Google advanced search window which finds web pages containing at least one of the words. Hacks work. Things get better. (You just hope what you wanted hadn't been transliterated into Greek or wasn't encoded in its original Ugaritic cuneiform or something.) > > > > And Dean's suggestion that "most people use Hebrew and Phoenician > > alike in ASCII clones" is not worth consideration as a reason to > > "unify" Hebrew and Phoenician. > > Why not? How about 8-bit ISCII? ( http://tdil.mit.gov.in/standards.htm ) <quote> There are manifold advantages in having a common code and keyboard for all the Indian scripts. <end quote> Are there any Syriac fonts using Web Hebrew? Ugaritic Cuneiform fonts using Web Hebrew? Best regards, James Kass
