Re: Umlaut and Tréma, was: Variation sele ctors and vowel marks

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Jul 14 2004 - 17:59:34 CDT

  • Next message: Kenneth Whistler: "Re: Umlaut and Tréma, was: Variation sele ctors and vowel marks"

    On 14/07/2004 23:10, Kenneth Whistler wrote:

    > ...
    >
    >
    >
    Thanks for all the clarification which I have snipped.

    >
    >
    >>One
    >>such situation is Holam Male which never takes an additional combining
    >>mark*. So why can't we represent it as <VAV, HOLAM, variation selector>?
    >>
    >>
    >
    >Because the UTC has ruled out <CM, VAR> as interpretable sequences.
    >
    >

    Is there a better reason than "because we say so"? You don't have to
    answer that one.

    >
    >
    >>After all in practice there is no normalisation problem with this. (By
    >>the way, I am proposing as one option <VAV, variation selector, HOLAM>,
    >>but that has been opposed on the debatable grounds that what changes is
    >>not the VAV but the HOLAM - the best description is that the whole
    >>grapheme cluster changes.)
    >>
    >>
    >
    >I don't have a quarrel with describing things that way -- but you
    >just can't get from here to there with variation selectors.
    >
    >

    I don't quite understand you here. Are you saying that <VAV, variation
    selector, HOLAM> would be acceptable for representing a variation of the
    entire grapheme cluster, or that it would not?

    The alternatives which we might consider include <VAV, ZW(N)J, HOLAM>.
    This corresponds closely to Peter Constable's recommendations for Indic
    languages in http://www.unicode.org/review/pr-37.pdf, which is to use
    <base, ZWJ, VIRAMA>, and indeed to the existing special-case rule for
    Bengali RA + ya-phalaa in Figure 12 of that document. Or would we do
    much better to stick to <ZW(N)J, VAV, HOLAM> or <HOLAM, ZW(N)J, VAV>,
    keeping ZW(N)J outside the combining sequence?

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
    


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