[85848] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Klingon orthography (was: Okrand at qep'a')
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghunchu'wI')
Wed Jun 24 00:08:36 2009
In-Reply-To: <998A5FCE-F000-4A8B-94FA-1B0BF70E39B8@evertype.com>
From: "ghunchu'wI'" <qunchuy@alcaco.net>
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:07:15 -0400
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On Jun 23, 2009, at 7:07 PM, Michael Everson wrote:
>> That's a shortcoming of Google, not of the underlying data.
>
> I don't believe that this is correct. Case-pairing is a normative
> element of the Unicode Standard, and the Unicode Standard is the basis
> for character encoding on all platforms now and for the future.
Case-pairing is by no means mandatory. It's an extra step that can
simply be left out. That Google fails to give its users the option
of doing so doesn't make it a fundamental impossibility.
>> If any nonreversible operation is accidentally applied to any data,
>> the original is lost. This is a consequence of the very nature of a
>> nonreversible operation, not a shortcoming of the data itself.
>
> Casing operations ARE reversible, if case-pairing equivalences are
> respected.
"Respecting case-pairing equivalences" is cheating, because it lets
you claim that "S. Ewing MacHines" is equivalent to "sewing
machines". :-)
Okay, maybe not, but it's still bringing in something extra that
specifically supports your contention that there's something wrong
with using {q} and {Q} as separate letters. If you instead respect
case *distinctions*, which is easier for a computer to do than to
ignore them, the "problem" vanishes.
-- ghunchu'wI'
