Difference between Klingon and Tengwar

[William_J_G Overington]

In my opinion it would be far better to seek a situation of a helpful 
licence for a small payment as acknowledgement of their rights than to 
seek a situation of waiving.

The Unicode Standard could have a section on Scripts from Creative 
Writing, then a section of that as Star Trek and a subsection of that as 
Klingon glyphs.

Back in the 1980s I saw a paperback book "The Making of Star Trek" in a 
bookstore and I bought it.

I found it fascinating. It includes transcripts of lots of internal 
memos of the implementation of the original series.

One thing I remember, bearing in mind that the events described had 
happened in the 1960s, was a letter from a physician who had watched an 
episode on television enquiring how the doors that opened automatically 
worked, as such doors would be useful in a medical setting. The polite 
reply was that they were moved manually by two stagehands.

In later years I often remembered that when, by that time, such 
automatically opening doors had become quite widespread in places such 
as doctor's surgeries.

More widely I opine that it would be far better for the Unicode 
Technical Committee to have a "can do" approach to encoding so as to 
assist people pursue their dreams and aspirations than what often seems 
to be a "can't do" and "won't do" and an "only if big business wants it 
done" attitude that seems prevalent at the moment.

I declare an interest in that I have things that I would like to get 
encoded but cannot get encoded. I am at home in England using a laptop 
computer. I have a small webspace that originally came free with dial-up 
internet in 1997 but has been allowed to continue after the dial-up 
service closed, I have some budget software, though it is of very high 
quality. I am retired and simply cannot do many of the things that would 
be required to achieve the present high bar to encoding newly devised 
characters. Must my ideas simply remain as like some part of pure 
mathematics when if the encoding policies were different my ideas could 
be applied in practice and be useful to people? The Private Use Area is 
a great facility for trying things, but it is just not on for reaching 
the bar for showing established prior use that is required for proposals 
that do not come from within the inner loop.

I opine that the policy of all the proof of established use that is 
required before encoding that seems to be exercised when Unicode Inc. 
wants that, but abandoned if their mates want something done, is 
unreasonable.

It seems that a new policy of trying to provide service to people rather 
than continually pushing back on new ideas would be beneficial.

That would not abandon scholarship and doing things with precision.

Frankly, although it is the existing practice, what exactly, precisely, 
now that encoding using sequences makes the code space available for 
encoding vast, is the objection to encoding "items" as characters on the 
basis that there is a reasonable possibility that such an encoding might 
be useful to people in the future?

William Overington

Thursday 16 September 2021




------ Original Message ------
From: "Doug Ewell via Unicode" <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
To: unicode at corp.unicode.org
Sent: Thursday, 2021 Sep 16 At 17:03
Subject: RE: Difference between Klingon and Tengwar
Mark Davis wrote:
As I already noted, this imagined issue of "dignity" is offensive
beyond belief from a group that's supposedly culturally neutral.
Let's be very clear. This is an open list where most of the people on
the list are simply expressing their opinions. These opinions are too
often pure speculation that simply builds on other speculation voiced
on this list. With little or no factual foundation.
This "dignity" explanation is of that sort. I was around during the
discussions, and there was never any mention of "dignity" as being a
factor. The principal reason for not progressing Klingon was in fact
IP complications.
"Dignity" was my attempt to summarize, paraphrase, the second objection 
stated by Ken on Tuesday:
Klingon, on the other hand, was a case *both* for IP issues
interfering with a potential encoding that was being pushed *and* was
an early poster child for what was considered "frivolous" encoding by
many participants in SC2 as well as by many senior managers who were
paying the salaries of representatives they were sending to UTC
meetings.
If "dignity" is the wrong word to describe the quality of Unicode that 
would have been sacrificed, in the eyes of the senior managers, by 
encoding Klingon, perhaps "professionalism" or "credibility" or 
"seriousness" might be more suitable.
I'm not a member of Team Klingon either, but I do think if Klingon is 
going to be non-approved indefinitely, we should be forthright about the 
reason(s). I'd love to see a statement from Paramount's legal team, 
formally waiving any IP claims against Unicode for encoding it or font 
designers for implementing it, just to see where that gets us.
--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org


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