Michael Everson wrote:

>
> 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.

Seumas Simpson requested that we use <Ogam> and not <Ogham> in his
revision of his article for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics.

> 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.

Perhaps if I had ever seen Ogam type in 1993, I'd have done it
differently. What I had to go on were the drawings and regularizations
in handbooks, and the constraints of Fontographer.

> 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.

So where were you in 1993?

> > > 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.

Then don't criticize it on the basis of your own fantasies of how it
_might_ work.

> 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 will not be making another Ogam font.

> 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?

Why don't you go back through the archives and see who started the
"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.

There have certainly been major complaints about Cuneiform, Old Persian,
Phoenician, and Ugaritic; I would have no occasion to encounter
complaints in areas outside my own specialization.

The problem may entirely be in the person(s) who communicate Unicode's
decisions to the scholars, but it may not be.

> 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.

I have not aspersed the work. I have only read the extensive criticisms
of it on, e.g., ANE List, from the scholars who might consider using
type in philological work (highly inadvisable because the variations
from letter to letter are often the very points under discussion in such
contexts).

> > > >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?

You claimed to be an expert in Ogam.

> I speak Irish fluently, every day, and
> have typeset books in Irish regularly since 2001.

Which has what, exactly, to do with expertise in Ogam, a thoroughly dead
alphabet?

> 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.

Expertise in Celtic languages does not make one an expert in writing
systems, even Celtic ones.

> 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.

A non-boustrophedon Ogam inscription would begin its second line at the
bottom of the pillar and go up the second edge.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...