From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Nov 25 2003 - 18:27:36 EST
Rick McGowan writes:
> John Cowan suggested...
> > We will never come close to exceeding this limit. Essentially all new
> > combining characters are either class 0 or fall into one of the
> > 200-range positional classes.
>
> Or 9, for viramas.
Or 1, for overlays. Don't forget them...
Or 7, for nuktas that will need to combine first on the base letter of an
abjad, before applying a virama. But I do think that viramas, even in Indic
scripts, are acting like if they were real vowels, i.e. plain letters (only
combining).
But as soon as we encode logical interaction with viramas and nuktas, we
break the positional model. A script that uses both fixed positional (1 or
200+) and logical (10 to 199) combining classes appears broken for me. There
will always be complex problems related to the possible interactions between
nuktas/viramas/starter-combining characters and fixed positional characters.
A script should choose between the logical encoding of its diacritics (like
nuktas, viramas and Kana voiced sound marks), and the positional encoding of
its diacritics (like in Latin/Greek/Cyrillic), but never attempt to mix them
(this is not what occured on abjads in Unicode, and this is the source of
all problems). If there are difficulties, that script should not attempt to
use any positional system, but use only logical combining classes, or
starter combining characters (with class 0).
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