Re: [I18ndir] [Idna-update] FWD: Last Calls on two IDNA documents

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

Asmus,

Yes.  If I should have said more of that, or more clearly, I
apologize.  But I know Jefsey is familiar with many of those
issues even though most of us periodically forget until we are
reminded or trip over them.  

I would have added to your list of examples the observation that
Simplified Chinese, into which a good deal of energy has gone,
only dates from the 1950s although I'm very fond of the chart on
my wall that shows a hundred different ways in which "the same"
character has been written over time.  I'm not expecting it, but
were the Chinese government convene a committee to simplify
another several hundred characters (perhaps building on the
effort around 1977) and succeed, we (and the Unicode Consortium)
would have another interesting stability problem on our hands,
especially if the new character forms were one-one with the
"traditional" ones, because it might be possible to decide that
the new forms were typographical variations rather than separate
abstract characters.

best,
   john


--On Monday, August 5, 2019 15:00 -0700 Asmus Freytag
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On the subject of stability:
> 
> If you are thinking in terms of decades - many orthographies
> have been reformed in the last 100 years (many of them more
> recently).
> 
> Encoding stability is not your main concern if you want stable
> spelling of terminology.
> 
> (The last reform of German spelling was around 25 years ago
> and affected many words containing sharp-s, or doubled
> consonants - many of those were contractions of triple
> consonants which are are now spelled out: "Schifffahrt". Some
> other writing systems had rather radical reforms in the 60s.).
> 
> Unicode is already more stable than what it tries to model.
> 
> A./