Mark Davis wrote:
>- A combining character sequence is a type of "grapheme" (aka
"user character"). Besides CCSs, graphemes also include Indic
syllables, Thai/Lao syllables and Hangul Jamo syllables.
I have no objection with most of your message, but some concern
about this paragraph. I can't speak with any authority on Indic
or Hangul, but I'm pretty sure for Thai and Lao that syllables
would not be considered a grapheme. By structural and
functional criteria, preceding and following vowel characters
have as much claim to being graphemes (consider the character o
ang, which functions either as a consonant or as a following
vowel, and is certainly a grapheme regardless of the function),
and I have no reason to doubt that Thais consider these to be
as much graphemes as consonants. With combining vowels, tones
and other diacritics, it might be argued on structural grounds
that these are not graphemes, but the vowels, at least, are
functionally on a par with baseline characters, and again I
believe that Thais would consider them to be graphemes. It is
certainly true that the notion of syllable is significant in
the writing systems based on each of these scripts, but at
least for Thai and Lao, I don't think grapheme should be
equated with syllable.
Peter
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