I understood your complaint about Tibetan to be with how they handled
subjoined consonants...were your disagreements deeper than that? Although
I prefer explicitly coded subjoined consonants for Khmer...the issue is
not cut and dried and compromise is feasible.
I would come down very hard on behalf of phonetic encoding of Khmer...it
makes no sense for processing purposes to use a visual scheme (such as
Thai has used).
Maurice
On Fri, 17 Jan 1997 unicode@Unicode.ORG wrote:
> Maurice J Bauhahn asks:
> >
> > Rich McGowan mentions:
> >
> > > the Unicode encoding also has the advantage of delineating stack
> > > boundaries nicely without "n-character look-around".
> >
> > Please elaborate what this means. I understand it to mean that if
> > characters are encoded phonetically then (with Khmer) the stack (consonant
> > cluster) would always begin with a consonant or an independent vowel.
>
> I mean (VERY specifically for the Unicode Tibetan encoding ONLY) that given a
> consonant you know by its range whether it is the top of a stack or elsewhere
> in the stack without any look-ahead or look-behind. I can imagine that this
> would be convenient for some purposes; perhaps for instance in finding
> syllabic roots? I don't know...
>
> And to make it clear, I don't necessarily think that was the OPTIMAL solution
> for Tibetan, it is ONE solution, and since it has been encoded we should use
> it as intended and not inconvenience all uses and implementers by suggesting
> or ipmlementing anything else, even if the potential components of another
> "style" are available in the codeset.
>
> I also believe that NO OTHER Brahmic-derived or Indic-type script I know of
> should EVER be encoded the way Tibetan was.
>
> Rick
>
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