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From: alan@pdn.UUCP (Alan Lovejoy)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: generalised alphabets
Message-ID: <1209@pdn.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 31-Aug-87 11:20:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: pdn.1209
Posted: Mon Aug 31 11:20:15 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Sep-87 06:47:55 EDT
References: <15488@mordor.s1.gov>
Reply-To: alan@pdn.UUCP (0000-Alan Lovejoy)
Organization: Paradyne Corporation, Largo, Florida
Lines: 35
Xref: mnetor sci.lang:1272 comp.std.internat:195

A Proposal:

What is needed is to make a distinction between logical and physical
characters, and to distinguish between speech sounds and particular
audiographs (which can be further de-generalized into specific fonts).

If every letter for any human alphabet, and every ideograph, were given
a unique 32-bit (for example) id number, it would be possible to create
a 'character look-up table' whose indices were 8-bit numbers (for
example).  ASCII would then become a particular "character palette"
or mapping from 8-bit "logical" characters to 32-bit "physical"
characters.  If this sounds like color
graphics/pixels/color-lookup-tables, that's because the idea was
motivated thereby.

Also, the possible human speech sounds should be given unigue id
numbers (is 32 bits sufficient?), and a speech-sound to physical
character translation table would be used to represent each speech
sound with any desired character or sequence of characters.  The
character translation table and the speech sound translation table
would become standard features of all operating systems, and could
be defined at the beginning of each text file.  The character
translation table would either translate an 8-bit index directly 
into a physical character, or else into a speech-sound which could
then be translated into (a) physical character(s).  This option would
be independently decided for each 8-bit character index.

Text files that begin normally would be considered to be ASCII files,
and the 8-bit codes would use the ASCII palette.  With the proper
esape sequences, palettes could be changed at any time, either by 
selecting a predefined palette, or defining new one.

Can anyone suggest improvements on this?  What do you think?

--Alan@pdn