["Unicode"] two Hanzi

[Andrew West]

On 20 March 2014 14:12, "Jörg Knappen" <jknappen at web.de> wrote:
>
> Who writes a proposal?

I wish that there was a mechanism for encoding CJK characters that
allowed individuals to simply submit characters with appropriate
evidence to Unicode, and after review they could be added to the next
version Unicode, but the reality is that you need to go through a long
and bureaucratic process involving the Ideographic Rapporteur Group
(IRG), with the result that it may take ten years to get a CJK
character encoded.  Even the Unicode Consortium seems powerless to
overcome IRG bureaucracy, as the sorry tale below illustrates.

In 2012 I wrote a proposal to encode 226 Han characters, including two
fish characters previously requested by Shi Zhao on this list
<http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2012-m05/0259.html>,
which I submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC):

<http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12333-cjk-f.pdf>

The UTC accepted this document, and included the suggested characters
in the Unicode submission to the IRG for inclusion in the CJK-F
extension:

<http://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg39/IRGN1888_UTCExtensionF.zip>

This was discussed at the IRG meeting in Hanoi in November 2012
(http://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg39/IRG39.htm), but the
Unicode submission for CJK-F was entirely rejected by IRG just because
the submission was a couple of days late.

The UTC later submitted a proposal to encode 19 of the original
characters (including Shi Zhao's two fish characters) as urgently
needed characters:

<http://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg40/IRGN1936_UTC_UNC.zip>

But this was rejected by IRG in November last year as they considered
that these characters were not urgent enough, so now we will have to
wait another four or five years before they can be considered for
CJK-G.

Good luck getting the characters for newtonium and nebulium encoded any sooner!

Andrew