On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 7:29 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
2008/7/24 Ting Chen Wing.Philopp@gmx.de:
Total, leaving aside the caps, thirty or so. Forty if we fill in the missing tiles. Can we rustle up thirty more visually different characters? I'm sure we can... anyone have a handy list of what writing systems we've used so far?
Here is a list of writing systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems
And we can surely ignore writing systems that would never make to our projects (egypt hierographs and other dead languages), so in total, it is not so much
Thanks to Guillom (who found it when I couldn't), a list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logos_and_slogans#Alphabets_represent...
Armenian - [blank] - [blank] - [blank] Khmer - [blank] - Japanese - Klingon Tibetan - Greek - Latin - Arabic Devangari - Chinese - Cyrillic - Hangul [unknown] - Kannada - Hebrew - Thai
So, thirty more to play with. I would like on principle for us to include a dead system or two - even if we don't work in them, it's a nice nod to include cuneiform or demotic Egyptian. I would have said 'Mayan', but that's far too complex for us! (Another dead system which we might want to consider: Ogham, since it has a very nice "ui-" character, Uilleann.)
I can see why we might not want too, though, so I won't argue this much - but I'd like to consider it...
We may also want to think about quietly substituting Klingon for something else, given we've closed tlh.wp!
It would be great to see a dead language in the mix. As an example of how it ties into Wikipedia, an extension has been created in order to render hieroglyphs, and it is in use on Wikipedia articles about related topics, so these languages are not excluded from the mission of Wikipedia entirely. They would be a better choice than Klingon!
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiHiero
I had always assumed the missing pieces represented lost or dead languages, and the symbolism was that we didnt want to loose any more knowledge/languages/etc. I'm off to find and read the backstory, if there is one.
Perhaps dead languages can be used in the 3D model for the pieces that are missing in the current logo - they would not be coveted spots anyway if they were missing from the default logo.
-- John Vandenberg