Status of recent proposals

Philip Newton philip.newton at gmail.com
Fri Oct 1 21:23:20 CEST 2010


On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 7:11 PM, Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com> wrote:
> On 2 Oct 2010, at 00:03, Kent Karlsson wrote:
>
>>> 4.  Wolof Suppress-Script
>>>
>>> This was proposed by Peter (with form) on September 19.  Peter noted
>>> that a convention exists for writing Wolof in the Arabic script, making
>>> the Latin Suppress-Script field inappropriate.  There was no objection
>>> from the list on removing this field.
>>
>> That "a convention exists for writing Wolof in the Arabic script" is very
>> far from denying that "the overwhelming majority of documents in Wolof
>> are written in the Latin script". The former may well be true without in
>> any way diminishing the truth of the latter. For this suppress-script to
>> be removed, I'd like to see a convincing argument that the latter
>> statement isn't true.
>
> I agree with Kent on this one.

And I do too, and I thought I had said as much earlier, which is why I
was a bit surprised to see Doug say there was "no objection from the
list on removing this field."

*digs around in mail archive*

I said,

> You still haven't documented how much Arabic is actually used; for all
> I know, it could be 98% Latin, 2% Arabic, in which case Suppress-Script:
> Latn would still be appropriate.

and Peter replied,

> Reportedly, it's used enough that the Ministry of Education has
> published a standardized orthography in Arabic script as well
> as teaching materials. Even if that's still relatively small, that's
> definitely not the kind of scenario for which Suppress-script
> was intended.

So on second thoughts, I suppose I wasn't particularly vehement or
clear in my objection.

I still don't object vehemently, but neither do I think that the
existence of an alternate orthography is sufficient grounds to remove
the Suppress-script outhand. (Necessary, but not sufficient.)

In the meantime, I had read a little on the situation there and found
a proposal for encoding some additional letters for Arabic script for
Arabic (and Philippine) languages in Unicode, which makes it seem more
official to me and, though perhaps not demonstrating _current_ use,
implying _potential_ future use enough to make Latin no longer an
"overwhelming majority".

Whether Suppress-script should be removed now or could wait until
then, I'm tending to be neutral right now.

Ah well, Michael has rejected the proposal anyway, so we'll see what
happens next time Peter submits it.

Cheers,
Philip
-- 
Philip Newton <philip.newton at gmail.com>


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