[Lexicog] Re: Using older dictionaries

[Michael Everson]

On 23 Dec 2009, at 20:03, billposer at alum.mit.edu wrote:

> Michael Everson wrote:
>> For the African syllabaries now entering the digital world, we have  
>> to at least try to ensure that the ordering makes some kind of sense
>
> While I agree that these systems ought to have sensible orderings, I  
> wonder about the locus for this effort. That is, if I am correct
> in thinking that "we" means "the Unicode Consortium", is that the  
> appropriate group to be choosing orderings?

No, because the Universal Character Set is not just Unicode. It is  
also the ISO National Bodies. And it's not the UTC that chooses. It  
will be me, working with local experts and other experts. Collectively.

Most end users who don't have expectations about ordered wordlists  
will just accept what the computer gives them, eventually, when they  
begin to use the script on computers. (So we try to do a good job.)

> If there is an existing ordering, of course it makes sense to encode  
> the characters in that order, but if there isn't, I don't see why it  
> is necessary to include an ordering in Unicode (beyond choosing some  
> order for the encoding).

Specification of some sort of default ordering is a technical  
requirement. The minimum will be the binary order of the characters in  
the code chart. But this needs to be chosen anyway.

> After all, sort order depends on the locale (that is, combination of  
> language and country/user group) and may vary within a "script",
> which is really a typographical rather than linguistic concept.

I don't agree. Vai is used for one language in two countries. It's  
conceivable that the two countries might sort differently, but  
nevertheless the code chart and the ordering specifiaction were  
devised during the encoding process. This was done by building on what  
orderings did exist, and extrapolating with the superset of characters  
we were encoding. We worked with members of the user community, of  
course.

Anyway, it has usually been the case that we have had to devise  
orderings as scripts get encoded.

If you are saying that a script is a typographical rather than  
linguistic concept, I must beg to differ. The study of writing systems  
does have an academic linguistic basis, and has since Taylor > Gelb >  
Daniels. Script identity is not a matter of typography. Characters in  
scripts may have etymologies, or may be neologisms. But I may not have  
understood you.

Time for a glass of mulled wine and a mince pie.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/



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