Hello Mirjana, 

I am really distressed that, in Monday’s meeting, you seemed to be saying that everybody who made a substantive comment about our draft report was characterizing our work as “rubbish.”  I do not, repeat NOT, think our work was rubbish.  And I do not believe that the other commenters do either.

The Latin script is an enormous mess, require several orders of magnitude more effort to address than the task faced by any other script GP.  We have all worked hard, for many years, to deal with it.  And most of our work has been, in my opinion, quite good.  Anyone who follows us will inevitably work from the base we have created.

Obviously I think we have made some incorrect decisions on a couple of points.  But that is a far cry from disparaging the whole thing, or suggesting that it be thrown out entirely. 

For example, consider the matter of variants.  Since you and Michael are adamantly opposed to making changes to the threshold we used here, I am aware that it isn’t going to happen.

But suppose, hypothetically, that we were to change the threshold from 5 of 7 members to 3, or even 1 member finding a pair of glyphs to be indistinguishable.  Would all the work need to be redone?  Clearly not.  We have in hand the rating spreadsheets that we used, and there would be no need to redo those.  All that would be required is to go thru and look at how many of us rated a particular pair 1 or 2.  That isn’t something that requires a lot of expertise or a lot of work.  It is, frankly, a clerical task.  A low level clerical task. 

Warmest regards,