--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:

> At 03:20 +0000 2005-08-08, suzmccarth wrote:
>
> >It is interesting to me that there is a similarity in the two
> >situations.
>
> I don't see any analogy between Cree and Vai at all.

White(-hearted) man's conspiracy to kill the scripts by imposing
perfection? Mind you, there's still a long way to go with Vai - no
tone marks yet!

> >I would like to hear Michael comment on what technical

complications

> >are present
>
> Please be precise in what you are asking for. "Technical
> complications being present" doesn't mean anything. What kind of
> complications?
>
> >when the 'chart' is so different from the inventory which script
> >users typically use.
>
> The inventory is a superset of characters in historical and modern

use.

You make it sound as though there is quite a lot of annotation to be
drawn up for the Unicode charts. There are already enough knock-on
effects with the confusables for the Roman/Greek/Cyrillic/Coptic(?)
BEIKT, plus quite a few other cases of lesser scope. I'm not sure
what is being categorised as 'in historical use'. I would have
assumed that that referred to the characters provisionally named for
Unicode using the word 'Ndole'; possibly some characters named using
the word 'symbol'; and the syllables impossible in Vai.

There seem to be syllables that failed, i.e. were proposed / promoted
but have not made it into use by the general populace. Are these
counted as historical?

Technical complications I can think of are:

1) Keyboard design (but I'm not sure that there really are any
special issues here). Would one need a Vai IME?

2) Transliteration, even between the three scripts used for Vai. I'm
not sure how possible this is - does the Roman script normally show
tonal information? Strictly speaking, transliteration into Vai
should probably use the full repertoire even if the general populace
just ignores the 'diacritics'.

3) Folding from 'full' repertoire to 'general use' repertoire. I
wonder if the Unicode standard should identify the 'general use'
repertoire? Is this an editorial issue? It seems like a Unicode
issue rather than an ISO/IEC 10646 issue to me.

I don't think any of this detracts from the merits of the Vai
proposal.

Richard.