ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N 4161R - DKUUG standardizing

Hungary: Negative
Technical comments
T1. Clause 31, Annex A.1: Old Hungarian name:
The term Old Hungarian is incorrect. The correct term is “Szekely-Hungarian Rovas”. The term “Old Hungarian”
is used for a completely different script, namely the medieval version of the Hungarian Latin-based orthography.
See ISO/IEC JTC1/Sc2/WG2 N4120, Section 2.1 for the detailed reasoning
(http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4120.pdf)
Proposed change by Hungary:
Change the term “Old Hungarian” to “Szekely-Hungarian Rovas”
Propose non acceptance
See also comments T1 from Canada, China, France, Hungary, and Romania.
The naming of that block has proven controversial, and from further discussion among experts it does not seem
that consensus can be reached without a face to face meeting with all interested experts, including representative
for the Hungary MB.
The content of the amendment will be left unchanged, still using ‘Old Hungarian’. However an Editor’s note will
be added to the text mentioning the following:
The terminology ‘Old Hungarian’ is only tentative. Other terms for naming the repertoire and the characters
within have been suggested:
- Szekely-Hungarian Rovas
- Rovas
- Rovasiras
- Hungarian Runic
Interested experts are invited to come to a consensus either through the ballot process or at the disposition of
comment taking place at the next WG2 meeting, February 2012,Mountain View, CA, USA. In absence of
consensus, the encoding of this repertoire into ISO/IEC 10646 may be postponed.
T2. Annex G: Old Hungarian character set:
The proposed character set for the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas (with the incorrect name “Old Hungarian”) is
incorrect. Reasons:
1. The character repertoire is based on the outdated results of the palaeography in the early 20th century and
some unscientific and popular web sites, on which information is unreliable and incorrect in many cases.
Oppositely, the correct character repertoire must contain the contemporary and the historical
Szekely-Hungarian Rovas characters, which are listed in the proposal of the Hungarian Standard Body;
see ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N4007, Section 3.1, http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4007.pdf
Proposed change by Hungary:
The “Old Hungarian” block is unacceptable and unimprovable; therefore it must be completely changed to the
character repertoire in the proposal of the Hungarian Standard Body, see ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N4007,
Section 3.1, http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4007.pdf
Propose non acceptance
Saying that the current block is unacceptable and ‘unimprovable’[sic] is an overstatement. Comparing the
repertoires between the ballot text and the document N4007 shows that the ballot repertoire is a clean subset with
the exception of 10C9D OLD HUNGARIAN CAPITAL LETTER NIKOLSBURG OE and 10C9E OLD
HUNGARIAN SMALL LETTER NIKOLSBURG OE. It would be more constructive to provide rationale for the 24
characters or so which are part of N4007 which were not added in the amendment text. This is the regular process
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