[vip] Educational session on existing variant practices

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 26.07.11 11:14, JFC Morfin wrote:
>> In English the "æ" is a ligature, and in some more languages. It is a 
>> separate letter and *not* a ligature in the Scandinavian languages 
>> that uses it.
>>
>> So whether something is a ligature, and because of that what is "the 
>> same" is context dependent.
>>
>>    Patrik
>
>
> In such a case, the solution seems to be to use a table where the 
> visual geometric symbol æ can be freely used by people along their own 
> orthotypography of their own language without caring about the ways 
> other languages, cultures, typographies, orthotypographies. Either it 
> is possible to bridge such a graphcode with unicode and we have to do 
> it, or it is not and here is the problem we (VIP, PRECIS, IUCG, ...) 
> have to address.
>

First, let's agree that we discuss variants not because of computers 
(DNS, as such), but because of humans.
It is humans that can declare something to be a variant or not. For 
computers and DNS in particular it is all different and computers and 
DNS, do not have any problem to resolve here.

When we consider the way humans read, we need to consider the fact that 
humans do not match characters in a (Unicode? ;) table, but rather 
interpret what they see and switch context. If the majority of the text 
is Cyrillic, as indicated by the presence of unique 
Cyrillic-(only/mostly) characters, then the human considers that text 
'Cyrillic' and the letter 'a' is therefore Cyrillic Small Letter A, and 
not Latin Small Letter A -- however identical those might look. Same for 
Greek and even much easier for the Arabic/Chinese scripts.

One common argument that pops up in such discussions is that 'most of 
the world uses ASCII already' -- but let me remind the saying "It all 
looks Greek to me" (or "Graecum est; non legitur"). In the not so 
distant future, DNS will not be ASCII-mostly anymore. We need to base 
our work on that assumption, or it will be obsolete in just few years.

Daniel