Re: script count?

At 07:52 -0500 2003-12-12, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>Michael Everson wrote:
>
>TWICE. Why are you sending me a duplicate of every message you send
>to the qalam list? That certainly enhances the annoyance factor of
>your postings.

I don't mean to annoy you, Peter. I don't even particularly enjoy
disagreeing with you, though I think you're being a bit unreasonable
at present. Hitting reply for this group adds it to the To: and the
Cc: fields and sometimes I forget to edit that, especially late last
night when I was up because I couldn't sleep. I apologize.

> > >Which of the 52 names that were posted do you claim stands for Syriac?
>>
>> Um, "Syriac", Peter. http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/bmp/ Row 07
>
>Which of the 52 NAMES THAT WERE POSTED do you claim stands for Syriac?
>
>If that list of 52 names was NOT, in fact, the list of names at the
>"Roadmap," why was it said that they were?

I was referring to what was on the Roadmap. You were referring to
what John sent out. The Roadmap contains many more than the 52 script
names. I am not responsible for what John writes, but he has
explained what he was doing when he made his list. Apparently several
people were talking at cross purposes.

> > That's what I said. [The Roadmap] lists Hiragana and Katakana, two
> > closely-related syllabaries with distinct usages, and CJK Unified
>> Ideographs, of which a fairly small subset is used in writing the
>> Japanese language.
>
>Like I said, cockamamie.

Being dismissive is easy. How would you encode Japanese? Would you
just put all the letters together in one bunch and call them
Japanese? You will still have to separate the syllabaries out because
they behave differently from the kanji. They come in large and small
sizes; they take combining marks. They need software to enter them as
independent entities. Japanese keyboards have a button that toggles
between Katakana and Hiragana. Golly, it sounds as though the
syllabaries are separate from one another. And of course it should
not be forgot that JIS, the Japanese standards institute, supports
the character set used for the Japanese language as it has been
encoded, as do all the major software firms.

> > Then, with respect, sir, you haven't put in much work to learn about
> > it. Unicode is *the* character set with which we will one day be able
>> to record all of the recorded history of mankind, insofar as its
>> writing systems are deciphered.
>
>I won't be around any more then.

That doesn't mean that you should delight in making unsubstantiated
complaints about it!

>Maybe it would have been better if
>Microsoft had gone ahead and imposed some international system _without_
>giving every government in the world a voice in it.

The standardization process is complex, and benefits GREATLY from
having national as well as corporate input. That "Myanmar" is applied
to "Burmese" is unbeautiful, but cosmetic nevertheless. The name of
the script in the standard is irrelevant. What is relevant is that
writing in the script can be processed and exchanged. Pooh-poohing
the whole project because of terminology mismatches based on
political pragmatism isn't useful. I prefer "Burmese" too. The
experts from the country in question didn't. And they publish
Myanmar-English Dictionaries too. Revisionist? Yes. Important? Not
really.

> > The IPA is a set of extensions to the Latin alphabet. It would be a
>> mistake to pretend that it is a separate script from Latin, because
>> there is so much overlap between the basic Latin alphabet and IPA
>> transcription. Further, many IPA transcriptions "graduated" to the
>> status of natural orthography, for instance in Africa, and the
>> lower-case IPA characters acquired upper-case forms.
>
>One of the sources of IPA way back in 1888 was the symbology developed
>by Koelle in the 1850s for African languages.

That doesn't mean that the IPA isn't a set of extensions to the Latin alphabet.

> > It's a Roadmap because the Unicode Project is a very big one, and
>> there is much work to be done in order to finish encoding the scripts
> > which we have yet to encode. The Roadmap helps us to do this. With it
>> we are able to determine how much space we have and what can fit into
>> it. We are able to use it in some way to prioritize the work we do.
>> It shows what has been standardized, what has been accepted for
>> ballotting, what has been proposed, and what hasn't had any work done
>> on it at all. It is a useful tool, and it has a lot of scripts listed
>> in it.
>
>It is a product of bureaucracy, with all the efficiency of the League of
>Nations.

The Roadmap is? Or the Unicode Standard? Either way you're mistaken.
There is bureaucracy in the standardization process. This applies to
standards for concrete and steel and jet engines and medical supplies
no less than it does to character encoding.

> > Charles Bliss' Blissymbolics language has its own grammar. On the
>> ground that grammar is modified somewhat to suit the spoken languages
>> used by the people communicating with the non-speaking people who
>> communicate using Bliss. But Bliss is linguistically robust, and has
>> been studied as a means for communication. In many ways it is
>> superior to other "symbol systems" used with non-speaking people,
>> precisely because it has grammatical functionality built into it.
>> Interestingly, it could be said that it is truly ideographic, because
>> no particular sounds are built into the characters. A text written by
>> a Finnish Bliss user can be read by an English-speaking one without
>> too much difficulty. Bliss has a non-trivial vocabulary and
>> neologisms can be coined.
>
>So whatever it is, it isn't a script. It's some sort of language
>substitute that includes a visual component. It's Leibniz's ideal? It's
>Eco's "Perfect Language"? Where's Bliss's Nobel Prize?

It isn't necessary to be snotty, Peter. Geez. Since you ask, however,
I will do my best to educate you. It isn't a "language substitute".
It's a constructed language which can be -- and is -- used by people
who have no access to communication via spoken language. You can
learn more about why this is a good idea from experts who work

Charles Bliss thought he was creating a utopian language, which could
be read by anyone. It was "symbolic" he thought, and had no
pronunciations. Of course as a utopian language it was a failure. In
1971 it was applied to the communication of some Canadian children
with physical disabilities. From the Blissymbolics Communication
International website:

"Blissymbolics is a language currently composed of over 2,000 graphic
symbols. Bliss-characters can be combined and recombined in endless
ways to create new symbols. Bliss-words can be sequenced to form many
types of sentences, and express many grammatical capabilities. Simple
shapes are used to keep the symbols easy and fast to draw. Because
both abstract and concrete levels of concepts can be represented,
Blissymbolics can be applied both to children and adults and is
appropriate for persons with a range of intellectual abilities. For
those who have a communication impairment, Blissymbols can be used on
simple communication boards mounted on wheelchairs, on dedicated
electronic devices with synthetic speech and within computer
software. Now that Blissymbol software has been designed to be used
with computer mediated communication (CMC), the application of this
meaning-based communication system can be expanded to many other
populations. Its potential to facilitate global communication using
the Internet is boundless."

The graphic elements which are used constitute a script. They can't
be equated with any other writing system. You can see them at
http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1866.pdf

> > Braille functions more or less as a cypher for other writing systems.
> > It's not so "scriptlike" in that sense.
>
>But you have no definition of "script(like)"? Yet you can definitively
>say what is or isn't a script.

Braille is used to represent the graphic elements of different
scripts. It can represent Latin, Cyrillic, Hiragana, and either
Bopomofo or Pinyin (I am not sure how it is used in China). It's
scriptlike because it's like a script, but unlike other scripts it
can't be called alphabetic, or syllabic; it's a chameleon.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com