A comment on draft-faltstrom-idnabis-tables-05.txt

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Towards the end of the week I got around to reading the current drafts, 
and looked twice for the following:

    o the ou ligature (in Abenaki, French orthography lacked a "w" 
character at the time literacy in text was adopted), which is used 
interchangably with the "w" and the "ou" sequence of two characters, and 
the numeral "8" (particularly after the typewritter entered broad use);

0223        ; PVALID      # LATIN SMALL LETTER OU

    o the code points for UCAS, not that I'm particularly fond of the 
"U" or the "C" part of that, as Dirk's approach does make historic texts 
in Siksika and Carrier and Cree pre-UCAS orthographies more difficult, 
but it is a script in use;

1401..166C  ; PVALID      # CANADIAN SYLLABICS E..CANADIAN SYLLABICS CAR
166D..166E  ; DISALLOWED  # CANADIAN SYLLABICS CHI SIGN..CANADIAN SYLLAB
166F..1676  ; PVALID      # CANADIAN SYLLABICS QAI..CANADIAN SYLLABICS N


    o the code points for Tsalagi;

13A0..13F4  ; PVALID      # CHEROKEE LETTER A..CHEROKEE LETTER YV


I wrote the author of the tables draft, mentioning the first and last of 
these three, forgetting the second, and the reply was a suggestion that 
I explain why I would want these.

While Abenakis have, and can continue to use characters other than "8" 
and the ou ligature to represent a character common to a very large 
number of words (not quite as bad as "e" in English or "ii" in Siksika, 
still wicked common, in fact, the correct way to write "Wabanaki" is 
(obviously) with the ou ligature, and it that is not available, either 
the numeral "8" or the alpha "W". All the northern New England, 
Maritime, and most Quebec Indians consider themselves to be "Wabanakis", 
the name of the pre-contact confederacy, and also simply meaning "Dawn 
Land People".

The case for UCAS, whether called Inuktitut or Cree Syllabics (both 
slight abuses of convention) is rather obvious, instruction in several 
languages in the primary grades is conducted using the script. I'm 
definitely a spectator, barely being able to read simple Cree in syllabics.

I've not forgotten the earlier suggestion in the prior WG (and 
elsewhere) to define Cherokee as "confusingly similar" and therefore to 
make its character repertoire invalid. My view hasn't changed. Better 
mechanisms exist to eliminate "confusingly similar" visual properties of 
individual characters than marking the character(s), independent of any 
other context, as invalid, see for instance the problems posed by arabic 
numerals (RTL) in BIDI scripts.

Look (imperfectly) through the IDNA archives, which I've mostly ignored 
up until now after the infrastructure-or-applications choice was made, I 
see that someone made this comment: "... Cherokee which has little 
current use and is a problem for confusables, but whose elimination 
could be a cause celebre and be taken as discriminatory."

As it happens, registration for the CNO's online language class is still 
open and the next cycle of classes begin on April 7 2008 and run through 
June 13 2008. To register go to: http://www.cherokee.org/siteregistration/

Anyone who wants to learn the language may, the classes are free, and 
fonts are available from the CNO site.

I trust this has been sufficiently responsive to the tables draft 
author's suggestion. Again, I'm pleased to see these repertoires "valid".

Eric Brunner-Williams