From: Cary Karp (ck@nic.museum)
Date: Mon Nov 21 2005 - 11:39:45 CST
Quoting Mark Davis (quoting me):
>> I assume that at least part of the answer lies in the fourth
>> Yiddish digraph 'pasekh tsvey yudn', HEBREW LIGATURE YIDDISH
>> DOUBLE YOD WITH HEBREW POINT PATAH (U+05F2 U+05B7). Which (I
>> further assume) would decompose and recompose correctly only if
>> the YIDDISH DOUBLE YOD ligature were the canonical form. What I
>> don't understand, is why the entire pointed digraph wasn't
>> represented as a single precombined character, with it then being
>> possible to decompose the other three ligatures ...
>
> I don't recall exactly why the yiddish characters are treated in
> that fashion; it was some years ago. Perhaps Ken or someone else
> recalls.
Thanks to Mark for providing the info about current policy on the
introduction of precomposed characters. I would also be extremely
grateful if anyone could relate further details about the reasoning
that led to the encoding of the Yiddish digraphs as ligatures, in a
script that otherwise relies heavily on combination, and for a
language with a typographic tradition that is ambivalent about
representing the digraphs as ligatures.
Yiddish is one of the seven languages with offical legal status in
Sweden. The government has proclaimed 2006 as the National Year of
Cultural Diversity and one of the planned activities is the detailed
provision for these languages in IDN (targeted on .se and .museum,
which both have their NICs in Stockholm). We also plan to document
that process as a project in its own right. The value of the result
will certainly be enhanced by it providing as much background
information as possible about precisely such things as the whys and
wherefores of the role played by Unicode.
/Cary
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