The international encoding of the Rovas script gets further bogged down. The Old Hungarian Runic supporters indulge in nazi, antisemitic statements.
Instead of consensus – cultural Blitzkrieg
Since 2008, in the international encoding process of the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas (erronously called Old Hungarian / Hungarian Runic) there is an unfortunate “cultural war” waged by pro-Runic encoding activists against the Hungarian scientific-professional stakeholders and the user community. Although until 2012 April, the financially motivated foreign encoding activists did not have any Rovas userbase support, all of a sudden dozens of “new players” appeared on the encoding stage in Hungary.
Interestingly, they not only managed to organise couple of pro-Runic campaign program but even sent as many as 67 non-professional paying members to the 819. Informatics Committee of the Hungarian Institute of Standards – just for the time of 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.
Supporters of Hungarian Runic – Old Hungarian
Since the local supporters of the erroneous “Old Hungarian – Hungarian Runic” concept (Michael Everson – Szabolcs Szelp) showed up, loud political extremism appeared in the standardization process, despite the fact that the Runic supporters 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 Rovas script in its own fields of interest – strictly excluding political 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 national and international standardisation organisations as well.
Open extremism emerges
Until now, the Rovas user base and the scientific-technical community hoped that the national and international standardisation organisations did intend to reach widely accepted consensus in the character encoding of the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas. Unfortunetely, it turned out that encoding activists can force the erroneous and scientifically-technically not backed Old Hungarian – Hungarian Runic proposal without any criticism of the standardisation organisations.
Furthermore, the extremist, racist and antisemitic statements of the “runisation” supporters seemed not to reach the sensitivity level of the decision makers yet. Therefore, as a first step, the Hungarian scientific community published a declaration to the national and international standardisation organisations to stop the derailed encoding process of the Rovas script and restart is on the level of Working Group in order to reach real consensus.
In the same time, to supporters of the rival “Old Hungarian – Hungarian Runic” concept (Everson-Szelp) do continue on their rally of intimidation and hatred.
The signatory of the N4267 Unicode document, Miklós Szondi – reiterd prison guard, former member of state party MSZMP of the communist regime in Hungary – managed to publish another questionable declaration. Mr. Szondi and 6 other signatories take it upon themselves to call the representatives of the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas proposals “khazarisationist” (cover phrase of Jewish) and commit futher defamations based on their obscure ideological-political conspiracy theory in context of a suspected Israel-linked politician. Doing all this, their declarations contains even faked title one of the signatories pretending to be the representative of the Hungarian Institution of Standards.
The question is what the Hungarian Institution of Standards do want to say about the extremist misuse of its name?
NO to the extremists backed erroneous standard
The standardisation institutions do have to face the fact that the recent encoding procedure of the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas has derailed. The protest against the “push-through” of the unacceptably wrong Old Hungarian – Hungarian Runic proposal will be internationally demaging the trust in ISO-Unicode encoding. In case of forcing further wrong standards, alternative solutions to avoid them are already prepared and will highlight the incorrect result of an incorrect procedure.
The only solution is to restart the encoding at WG level.
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