Re: Why wasn't it possible to encode a coeng-like joiner for Tibetan?

From: Christopher Fynn <chris.fynn_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2013 03:02:19 +0600

The main thing is everyone finally agreed to accept the encoding we
have today ~ though there had been objections to a number of earlier
proposals.China actually wanted an encoding that would have ended up
with 6000+ characters - but they finally agreed to this one.

The encoding actually makes a lot of sense to anyone brought up
speaking and reading Tibetan.

Given the encoding model used there are some characters which are not
strictly necessary - including 0F00, 0F73, 0F75, 0F76, 0F75,
0F77,0F78 0F79.

All these these in a way were left overs from earlier proposals.

0F7B could have been represented by 0F7A + 0F7A; 0F7D by 0F7C + 0F7C

0F43 could have been represented by 0F42 + 0FB7 and 0F93 by 0F92 + 0FB7;
0F57 could have been represented by 0F56 + 0FB7 and 0FA7 by 0FA6 + 0FB7; etc.

Letters like these are spelt as two letters by Tibetans and collate as
such in Tibetan dictionaries so they are not really separate letters
in the Tibetan alphabet as they are in Devanagri.

The purpose of having most of these characters there was to facilitate
conversion between Tibetan and Devanagri scripts.

- Chris
Received on Sat Apr 13 2013 - 16:04:31 CDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Sat Apr 13 2013 - 16:04:32 CDT