On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 08:22:23 -0400, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> Then you should be chastising Unicode, not the deviser of the
> terminology, since the terminology seems to have been taken over without
> understanding and inaccurately.

{Dilettante warning :) }
This does seem to be a good example to support having a breadth of
knowledge; it looks as though the creators of Unicode had a passion to do
their best, but with better knowledge of linguistics (and WWS!), they (to
some modest extent, it seems to me) missed a chance to educate and
redefine.

One significant reason I invested in Unicode manuals (and, for me, they
are quite costly) was for their presentation of most of the important
character sets. Considering the recent dialogue, it has become even more
clear that one shouldn't try to seriously learn about some aspects of
writing systems from the Unicode manual. As John Jenkins pointed out, the
manual is for use by IT people, primarily.

Unicode.org apparently changed their code points some time back, and
caused significant grief for some users. Now that there's a solemn promise
not to change, again, the existing definitions are likely to remain
unchanged for a considerable time. Of course, accompanying text you be
rewritten (again) for Unicode 5.0, at the risk of creating significant
grief for the standard's primary users.

===

Btw, I concur with Peter D. that Suzanne McC. would have done better to
explain earlier her reasons for becoming Qalamish, and I say so with
respect and sympathy. Nobody's perfect, and I can well understand a
civilized reluctance to be too self-promotional; I have tried not to be.

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
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