At 15:59 -0400 2005-08-14, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> > I'm not wrong about this. Typically, Ogham font glyphs *do* include a
>> stemline on either side of the strokes of the letter. In this way you
>> can type two letters next to each other and they don't run together.
>
>I really don't care what "Typically, Og[]am font
>glyphs *do*," and I obviously did not suggest
>you were wrong about these alleged "typical"
>fonts.

If you had cared about what Ogham fonts do (we
spell this word with an h now in Ireland, thank
you very much), then perhaps the Ogham fonts in
the WWS would look better. As it is, they are
idiosyncratic and rather ugly.

I do not say this to piss you off. You apparently
don't like anything I say on principle. That's
pretty boring, and I don't really understand why
you're hostile all the time. People in this
business have few peers. It's bizarre to me that
peers shouldn't get along.

I say it because I have studied Ogham typography
-- both lead type and computer fonts -- and I
know what I am talking about. There is nothing
"alleged" about these fonts. And I pointed you to
a page with font samples of different Ogham fonts
so that you could educate yourself about Ogham
font design.

Here it is again
http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/ogfont.html --
and please take heed before coming back at me
with another stinging riposte. If you aren't
interested in font design for the world's writing
systems then you haven't much business engaging
in it. Your Ogham font isn't very good. Take the
criticism. I'm more expert in the matter than you
are.

> > If either of these analyses are incorrect, perhaps you will enlighten
>> us as to the encoding structure of your font.
>
>You're free to purchase a copy for examination.

There is no reason for me to buy your font. It is
inauthentic as far as Ogham font design goes, as
I have pointed out, and I have access to many
fonts which are both more attractive and more
accurate and which can correctly represent Ogham
data because they follow the Unicode encoding.

One of the reasons the people who read this list
read it is to learn things. Another reason is
that some of us have things to teach. It is a
pity that you don't feel that you can learn
anything from us.

I have tried to be courteous explaining about
Ogham fonts and encodings (though blunt about my
views about the design of your own Ogham font).
Is it really necessary to do nothing but try to
show me up every time with one-line zingers?

> > >Nowadays, anyone in the world could reproduce much of the content of
> > >WWS with an off-the-shelf OS. In 1993, that was not an option.
>>
>> Yes, and I am pleased to point out that much of that can be done
>> because of the work I have been doing for more than a decade, to
>> encode minority and lesser-used scripts in the Universal Character
>> Set.
>
>I wonder how much of your work is the work that turns out to be the
>subject of intense complaint and criticism from those who try to use it.

I have helped to encode Balinese, Braille,
Buginese, Buhid, Cherokee, Coptic, Cuneiform,
Cypriot, Deseret, Ethiopic, Georgian, Glagolitic,
Gothic, Hanunóo, Khmer, Limbu, Linear B,
Mongolian, Myanmar, New Tai Lue, N'Ko, Ogham, Old
Italic, Old Persian, Osmanya, Phoenician, Runic,
Shavian, Sinhala, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tai Le,
Thaana, Tibetan, Ugaritic, Unified Canadian
Aboriginal Syllabics, and Yi, as well as many
characters belonging to the Latin, Greek,
Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts.

I can think of no substantive or material error
in any of those encodings that prevents users
from representing their data in any of them.
There was a political kerfuffle about Khmer a few
years ago, but companies like Microsoft have
implemented it without difficult and without
changing the encoding.

I am happy to respond to criticism of my work.
But casting uninformed aspersions on it as you
have ought to be beneath you.

> > >And have you published your great insights in, say, a journal of Celtic
> > >studies?
>>
>> I cannot imagine what journal of Celtic studies would bother to
>> publish a note about Damian's use of the word boustrophedon in a book
> > about writing systems.
>
>Is that the extent of your "expertise"?

What is your criticism here? My credentials in
Celtic? I speak Irish fluently, every day, and
have typeset books in Irish regularly since 2001.
I have studied modern Breton and Middle Welsh and
published an English translation of Roparz
Hemon's Grammaire Bretonne in 1995. I edited a
500-page English-Cornish Dictionary in 2000 (and
am preparing the second edition at present) and
the first complete New Testament published in
Cornish. I published a translation of Alice in
Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and am
preparing to publish a translation of The Hobbit
in Irish. My review of Ken George's dictionary of
Cornish in "Kernewek Kemmyn" orthography was
published in the peer-reviewed journal Cornish
Studies. My expertise was recognized in a New
York Times article (on the front page of the
technology supplement) and in NPR interview about
me and my work in 2003.

Don't pretend that I am not an expert in the world's writing systems.

I do not invest my energies in publishing
informative articles in scholarly linguistics
journals because I believe that the world's
writing systems are better served by my work
encoding scripts in the Universal Character Set.
My academic work is therefore practical and
technical, rather than educational and
informative -- though much of the text of the
script blocks in the Unicode Standard was
originally authored by me.

> > My point, however, is that Damian's use of the word to characterize
> > Ogham writing is incorrect. because a boustrophedon text has a
> > line-break where the directionality of the text is reversed,
> > and that behaviour does not occur in the Ogham corpus.
> > Up-over-and-down in a single line of text is not boustrophedon.
>
>So has your idiosyncratic interpretation of this word found its way into
>the "Unicode glossary" the way someone's idiosyncratic -- entirely
>screwed up -- interpretation of "abugida" and somewhat screwed up
>interpretation of "abjad" did?

Boustrophedon, according to you, is "a style of
writing a document in which lines of text read
alternately left to right and right to left or
(vice versa); of practical value when a
monumental inscription occupies a very broad
wall, and of psychological value because the eye
need not hunt for the beginning of each
succeeding line; however, no script formerly
written boustrophedon has retained the style."

There is nothing incompatible with *your*
definition of boustrophedon and *my* assertion
that Ogham texts do not alternate lines of text
in boustrophedon fashion. Boustrophedon is
over-and-back-and-over-and-back-and-over-and-back.

Ogham stones do not alternate lines *at all*.
Up-over-and-down is *not* boustrophedon, and
Damian McManus was incorrect to use the word
boustrophedon to describe Ogham in his article.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com