Michael Everson wrote:

>
> I'm not suing anyone, Marco. I'm trying to make sense of what has
> become a rather acrimonious debate, which I didn't start, and to try
> to determine whether Peter Daniel's accusations about the Unicode

Who's?

> editors "distorting" his definitions is correct.
>
> At 14:04 +0200 2004-07-12, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>
> >How about letting the rest of us know the URL(s) of the pdf file(s)
> >and the page number(s) where the relevant definitions are? Possibly,
> >also the page numbers of the corresponding definitions on the WWS,
> >for those of us who own a copy?
>
> The definitions Peter has criticized come from
> http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/b1.pdf the Glossary to
> Unicode 4.0, though we do not know what it is about these definitions
> that he criticizes.

Their deviation from the definitions of the words as they were presented
to the scholarly public in 1988 [talks in Princeton, Chicago, and
Milwaukee], 1990, 1992, and 1996.

> In order to ensure that he *has* read them, I
> suggested that he type them in to a mail to this discussion forum,
> and also type in the definitions which come from "the glossary in the
> front, and in the first pages of the first chapter" of his book, and
> then to show us what the alleged distortions were so that errors
> could be corrected if necessary.
>
> Peter has so far refused to do this, out of stubbornness, I suppose,
> rather than out of an inability to type the four sentences into an
> e-mail message.
>
> Still: he is the one who has claimed that Unicode distorted his
> definitions, and he should be the one to prove it.

I found the file; it was 33 pages of "Front Matter" received directly
from the designer. The relevant definitions are as follows; note that I
would no longer use "diacritic" in this way (but I forgot to put
"diacritic" into the glossary):

> abjad a type of writing system that denotes only consonants

> abugida a type of writing system whose basic characters denote consonants followed by a particular vowel, and in which diacritics denote the other vowels

> alphabet a type of writing system that denotes consonants and vowels

I cannot provide the Unicode definitions, because Acrobat Reader refuses
to allow any other program to be visible on the screen at the same time,
so I can't even open to the page and copy the text.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...