Historic scripts as MAYBE?

Paul Hoffman phoffman at imc.org
Sun Apr 27 21:08:28 CEST 2008


At 3:56 PM +0900 2/1/08, Martin Duerst wrote:
>I have to say that I'm very far from sold on the concept of MAYBE,
>but cloud it make sense to have historic scripts such as Runic as
>MAYBE?

The WG should revisit this topic, even with "MAYBE" being dead. Do we 
really want historic scripts as allowed characters for IDNs?

The Unicode Consortium has a list of archaic/historical scripts that 
are "no longer used to write living languages". See chapter 14 of the 
Unicode standard for the full description. The list there is:

Ogham
Old Italic
Runic
Gothic
Linear B
Cypriot
Phoenician
Ugaritic
Old Persian
Sumero-Akkadian

All of these are expressed in blocks, and therefore could easily be 
added to the IgnorableBlocks (D) category, which already contains 
Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols, Musical Symbols, Ancient 
Greek Musical Notation, and the Private Use Area.

I propose that we add all archaic scripts, as defined by the Unicode 
Consortium, to this category.


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