From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 03:49:20 GMT

In article <STEPHEN.92Apr5051920@estragon.uchicago.edu>, stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu (Stephen P Spackman) writes:
<In article <1992Apr5.022737.9286@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:

[Sorry for quoting this all again....  --PSH]

<|I used to think so, too.  Then I met Unicode.  Try this on for size:
<|Letters (with or without diacritical marks) found in European languages
<|are "characters" deserving space in the character set, whereas letters
<|(with or without diacritical marks) found in non-European languages may
<|be considered "glyphs" or "glyphic variants" and as such excluded, left to
<|the often not-so-thoughtful hands of software designers.  (The tone letters
<|of the Chinese _bopomofo_ phonetic script are "glyphic variants" of the
<|French accent marks, according to the top-level cadres over at Unicode.)
<|What do you think?  (You still have the flame torch, you know.  :-))
<
<I think you missed a large point. The word "glyph" (as I recall) is
<used in Unicode jargon to refer to the visual presentation of the
<symbol, and is distinguished in all cases from the "character" which
<is the thing coded. So *all* symbols in the character set are
<CHARACTERs, and the GLYPHS are the business of font designers. This is
<a distinction that seems to have very little to do with geography (in
<fact the remarkable thing about Unicode is how LITTLE regard it has
<for geography, though it shows too much for recent history - in the
<from of the contents and layout of the first 256 positions).

I fully agree with this last point.  In fact, it pertains to what I was saying
about Unicode.  Several months ago, a huge flamefest arose when a Vietnamese-
speaker was told by a top-level cadre at Unicode that Vietnamese letters
with diacritical marks (for instance, `e^?') would not be included in the
character set even though letters with diacritical marks found in European
languages (_e.g._, `e^', which occurs in French and some others) would be.
Writers of French could sleep well knowing that `e^' would always be displayed
(and nicely) on their computers; writers of Vietnamese had to hope that
`e' + <circumflex accent> + <Vietnamese `?' tone-mark> would be displayed
at all on their computers--attractively only if they were very fortunate.

(Fortunately, after months of some of the most intense flaming you've ever
seen, the Vietnamese lobby won--and gained space in the character set for
several dozen Vietnamese letters with diacritics.)

Another flamefest arose when I proposed the addition of tone-marks to the
_bopomofo_ character set sometimes used to spell Chinese phonetically.  Some
top-level cadre ignorantly asserted that those tone-marks are derived from
the diacritics used by lily-assed frogs and Czechs, for instance--they
couldn't possibly have been invented by yellow-skinned *Chinese* people, for
God's sake.

And the long `s' occurring together with our regular `s' in centuries of
documents in Latin, English, and many other languages is suddenly a "glyphic
variant" of `s'.  To hell with classicists.

<The notion of a "glyphic variant" is simply that two renditions of the
<SAME character might differ.

No.

<Now, cross-linguistic glyphic variants are an odd idea, but surely
<it's better to assign all the little diagonal lines that sit above the
<character and go up to the right to the same character code than to
<have several of them and argue about how many?

If one does that for *all* such diagonal lines, yes.  If one gives elevated
status to the diagonal lines written by lily-assed frogs and low status to
the diagonal lines of yellow-skinned Vietnamese, no.

<After all, the symbol a
<ALSO has different phonetic values in different languages, and you
<(in, dare I say it? your eurocentrism) are happy enough to class them
<all together.

I'm not happy to do it, but I do it.

<It's
<not "us" and "them". You discriminate or you don't. Don't.
                                                     ^^^^^

Agreed.  That's why I hate Unicode.

					--Scott

-- 
Scott Horne                               ...!{harvard,cmcl2,decvax}!yale!horne
horne@cs.Yale.edu      SnailMail:  Box 7196 Yale Station, New Haven, CT   06520
203 436-1848                Residence:  Rm 1848 Silliman College, New Haven, CT
ZANG4 HAN4 YI4 JIA1 / GONG4 JIAN4 ZHONG1HUA2!