From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Jan 03 2004 - 18:00:23 EST
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
> At 22:37 +0100 2004-01-03, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>
> >Note that a fundamental property of character identity is its most common
> >classification as a vowel, consonnant, or semi-vowel.
>
> That isn't true. The letter "v" is a vowel in Cherokee, a consonant
> in Czech, and (often) a semivowel in Danish.
Also: what are you demonstrating here? Only that distinct languages have
their own view on the classification of letters. But it's a fact that this
classification is a property of each character used in each language, even
if
the classification can vary between languages.
If simply I accepted and followed your argument, then the classification as
letters, digits or symbols, or as uppercase/lowercase/titlecase, or as
letters/ligatures would also be irrelevant in Unicode... How will you then
reveal a character identity with Unicode? What you say there, if accepted
universally, would make Unicode completely unusable in practice, and
impossible to unify without separating each language encoded with these
scripts.
So your argument is better militating for a better documentation of language
support and usage for each script, possibly with additional properties that
may
be missing in Unicode... Thanks we have other sources than Unicode to find
these additional properties, notably the other related standards and
repertoires
from which characters were imported and unified (here I include the mappings
of non-Unicode charactere sets onto Unicode-ISO/IEC10646 code points).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Jan 03 2004 - 19:27:38 EST