The “runization” attempt of the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas in the Unicode-ISO encoding process is supported by extreme ideologies.
History falsification and political implications
Unfortunately, loud political extremists (both leftist and rightists) managed to abuse the Rovas in their campaigns (generally against each other) – despite the fact that they are mostly ignorant about the script itself. In the same time however, the vast majority of the Rovas user base, researchers, scientists and developers form a very diverse community, that is silently using the script in their own fields of interest, excluding ideologies.
In this situation, the naming issue of the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas implies special responsibility not only for the stakeholders of the Hungarian national script but all the international standardisation bodies as well.
Therefore, the Rovas user community has officially articulated already several times in the encoding process that the so called “runization” attempt (naming the Rovas script as Rune or Runiform script) represented by Michael Everson (ISO 15924) and André Szabolcs Szelp is not only unscientific but has a dangerous side effect as well. Namely, intensifies the false association between the Nazi utilisation of the Runes and the Rovas usage of our days.
A typical example is the case of the International Book Fair in Frankfurt, 1999, where the Rovas books and materials were banned for political reasons: ?Some people worried about that the visitors of the Fair might connect our Rovas script with the German Runes, that would not be good because – although without any reason but as we repeatedly could experience it – part of the German public associate the education and cult of the ancient German script with the Nazis. (link)
Runes, Nazi swastika – in whose interest?
Since 2008, in the encoding process of the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas (erronously called Old Hungarian/Hungarian Runic) there is an unfortunate “cultural war” between the Hungarian scientific-professional stakeholders and the pro-Runic encoding activists. Although until 2012 April, the financially motivated foreign encoding activists did not have any Rovas user base support, all of a sudden dozens of “new players” appeared on the stage in Hungary.
Interestingly, they not only managed to organise couple of pro-Runic campaign program in a row but even sent as many as 67 non-professional paying members to the 819. Informatics Committee of the Hungarian Institute of Standardisation – just for the DAM-level voting of the enhancement process of the ISO/IEC 10646 Unicode character encoding standard.
Note, that a year ago, the same committee had only 13 professional members.
The majority of these new encoding “strawmen” has never had anything to do with the Rovas script, scientific research, nor encoding. Furthermore, some of the pro-Runic supporters publicly calling in extremist media for support of Michael Everson’s “runization” are representatives of marginal but loud political groups of questionable ideologies. No wonder, that during the last months, the encoding community had to endure threatenings, extreme, rasist and antisemitic public statements.
Therefore, the professional-scientific Rovas encoding community condemns all these unacceptable ideological acts, e.g that of Jozsef Androsovics – representative of the Hungarian Alliance Association, leading supporter of Michael Everson’s “runization” (pictures posted on community site)
As the public and official awareness about the Rovas encoding process rises in Hungary, the international standardisation organizations – ISO/IEC, Unicode – have to face more objection to the recent encoding practice. The joint declaration of the representatives of the Hungarian scientific, technological and standardisation community for stopping the scandalous encoding process of the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas and for restarting of an expert based standardisation is expected to be followed.
(Rovás Infó)
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