ISO 639 - New item approved - N'Ko
Mark Crispin
mrc at CAC.Washington.EDU
Fri Jun 9 19:14:41 CEST 2006
On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 09:46 -0700 2006-06-09, Mark Crispin wrote:
>> Regardless of which which Unicode character is ultimately selected for the
>> third glyph in the subject language, the ASCII (and presumably English)
>> name N'Ko should be registered too.
> There are names which cannot be represented in ASCII. Click languages for
> instance.
That is more due to a lack of will rather than a technical limitation.
By your argument, we can't name Japanese in ASCII since ASCII lacks the
Han characters for "sun", "base", and "language". The fact that we can do
so is because people with a mindset more towards practicality rather than
strict linguistic accuracy defined mappings to Latin script. These
mappings are quite flawed (especially for Korean) but are nonetheless
highly useful.
The example of click languages is an excellent argument of why there
should not only be an ASCII-only form. But it's not an argument of why
there should not be an ASCII-only form.
-- Mark --
http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
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