From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Oct 27 2003 - 14:49:03 CST
Peter Jacobi asked:
> Doug, Kenneth, All,
>
> I', somewhat confused. I assume I'm lacking a lot
> of background, but I can't interpolate successfully between
> your answers:
>
> "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net> wrote:
> > The Unicode character names attempt to be (a) unique and (b) reasonably
> > mnemonic. Anything beyond that is a bonus. They expressly do *not*
> > represent any form of transliteration or transcription scheme.
>
> Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com> wrote:
> > The 10646 naming conventions, which are stuck with A-Z for
> > transliteration, generally use doubled letters to indicate
> > retroflex consonants, particular for Indic languages. When
> > a third distinction needs to be made, as for Tamil, the
> > third name occasionally just gets a tripled letter, as is
> > the case for U+0BA9.
>
> Are UNICODE character names transliterations? Yes, No, Sometimes, Not
> Officially?
Officially, no.
But as Michael said, attempts are made to be reasonably consistent
where possible, so that NN *usually* means a retroflex n, if
relevant, EE *usually* means an open e, if relevant, and so on.
In other words, the names of the characters, in review of
the proposals, do try to follow some general conventions, so
that it isn't entirely random. But there is no overarching
scheme of rules which attempts to force all characters into
some official transliteration scheme. And as Asmus points out,
how could it, since many characters are used, with different
values and names, across many languages?
--Ken
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