Re: Unicode definitions of script types

Suzanne McCarthy <suzmccarth at yahoo dot com> wrote:

> Since everyone almost everyone can google and Unicode version 4 has
> been put up on the internet, one should not be surprised to see it
> as a resource in a grade 4 classroom. I stumbled on it
> unintentionally. Therefore, whoever writes the Unicode manual must
> realize that by posting it, it has entered public domain.

Not legally true. It's publicly available but still copyrighted. But
anyway...

> Anyone in any language community can check and see what their own
> language has been called and how it has been encoded. So if the
> consensus has been that Cree is a syllabary then most if not all
> Cree would expect to see Cree listed as such, not as an abugida.
> There would be no reason for members of any language community not
> to check and see how Unicode has listed and coded their langauge.

Any child in the U.S. up to at least third grade can look above the
blackboard (chalkboard, white board) in his or her classroom and see the
following chart:

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh ...

Does this mean that Unicode (and, for that matter, the ASCII committee
40-some years ago) has made a mistake by encoding the capital and small
letters in separate sub-blocks, instead of interleaving them as shown in
the schoolroom chart?

I think the role of Unicode as a linguistic and writing-systems
reference is being overstated again. It is a character encoding
standard.

-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/