Re: Level of Unicode support required for various languages

On 10/26/07, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
> With unicode itself scripts are allocated to the BMP or plane 1 based
> largely on the principal of is there a modern user community of a
> certain size, rather than put everything to the BMP. If the same had
> been done with CJKV then things would look very different, many
> Extension A characters would be in plane 2, or even plane 3, this
> would leave space in the BMP for characters submitted later but or
> modern use, and cjkv characters would follow the convention used for
> almost every other script.

But there's several issues to note here. Scripts are kept together; it
was natural to fill the Han ideograph section of the BMP first and
then overflow to another plane. In some real sense, you can see that
happening with stuff being added to Plane 1; there are collections
that have definite modern use that are being added to Plane 1 instead
of the BMP. I can see strong arguments to encode Blisssymbols in the
BMP instead of Plane 1, if there were the space.

Also, a modern user community includes scholars. Many of the first
scripts encoded in Plane 1 were opposed, because, as Nick Nicholas's
essay "Don't Proliferate; Transliterate!"
<http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/unicode_epichorica.html>
points out, scholars generally don't actually write in Cuneiform or
Egyptian Hieroglyphics*. The characters that scholars actually use are
encoded in the Latin section of the BMP. Are there a significant
number of characters that would rarely see print today even in
scholarly editions of old works? That's the convention used for other
works.

*IMO, whether or not scholars write in hieroglyphics is irrelevant to
the popular need for encoding what is written in popular Egyptology
books, like the ever-reprinted books of Budge. But that's beside the
point.