Tag characters

[Asmus Freytag (t)]

On 5/20/2015 6:14 PM, Shawn Steele wrote:
> I've always been a bit partial to them and found it odd that they are intentionally not included in Unicode.  Especially the novel concepts like the repeats.

:)

If I were to write an actual proposal I would suggest naming them after 
their international/modern use, but with the understanding that the 
actual interpretation would be based on whatever signalling system you 
intend to follow.

None of the existing users would be helped by having them named after 
their shapes and colors. That is because some of the shapes and colors 
are a bit complex an nobody I know learns them by description.

In a way, this is also what we do for many standard alphabets. We encode 
LATIN SMALL LETTER O, not "small letter looking like a round circle", 
and we leave it to the language whether to pronounce that long like an 
"oh"  or short, as in "hot" (for English) or more as an "oo" sound, as 
in Swedish. We pick a conventional name for the element of the alphabet, 
and then allow variations in use. (Some of the consonants show much 
greater variation in pronunciation).

When I said "naming" we should use the alphabetic abbreviations that 
they are associated with so that we can fit them into an open ended 
system, like the other flags. Then, whatever techniques we will be using 
(such as UFLs - Universal Flag Locators) would apply to them analogously 
to the national flags.

A./
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of Richard Wordingham
> Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2015 6:08 PM
> To: unicode at unicode.org
> Subject: Re: Tag characters
>
> On Wed, 20 May 2015 17:15:28 -0700
> "Asmus Freytag (t)" <asmus-inc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>> Have there been any discussions of the flag alphabet? (Signal flags).
>> It seems to me that when schemes for representing sets of flags are
>> discussed, it would be useful to keep open the ability to use the same
>> scheme for signal flags -- perhaps with a different base character to
>> avoid collisions in the letter codes.
> If these are worthy of coding, I think the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics would be a better model - encode the form, not the semantic.
> Braille is another precedent.
>
> Richard.
>
>