On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Rick McGowan <[email protected]> wrote: > In my opinion, the UTC would be irresponsible to approve the encoding for a > set of digits for a complicated system like Mayan without even having a > preliminary script proposal on record; and without any involvement of the > actual serious scholars in the field.
There's a lot of stuff where the modern use gets encoded before the ancient stuff gets investigated. Every major script seems to have been encoded before considering exactly how Chinese shell script or Latin medieval notation fits in. We have a body of characters used in modern contexts in modern ways. Why not encode that now, and encode separate digits for a complicated system like Mayan if it's necessary? Certainly given that Mayan is a complex system, and modern usage is usage in the context of Latin in the naïve way that Latin users often use other scripts*, there's a very good chance that modern users are going to need a separate encoding with different properties. * When Distributed Proofreaders was working on Hypnerotomachia, the 16th century edition we were working from had Hebrew that was hard to decipher, until we realized that the English printer had adjusted the line-length of the Italian version and moved words down to the next line, without realizing that Hebrew is read right-to-left. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
