From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Dec 20 2003 - 19:54:12 EST
jameskass@att.net
> Peter Kirk wrote,
>
> > > There are no distinctive features other than glyph shapes
> > > distinguishing Hebrew, Phoenician, Samaritan and "Early Aramaic" as
> > > proposed in ...
>
> Couldn't the same observation be made about many of the Indic scripts?
The way the various Indic scripts create ligatures and take contextual forms
make each of them very unique by themselves. The only common thing they have
is a set of common phonemes which are more or less near from each other,
with large variations between regional dialects.
The way each of these scripts were then used and created their own
orthograph for distinct languages and they were adapted to allow writing one
language in another with irregular orthographic rules is so important that
simple 1-to-1 transliterations from one to the other are very poor. You
can't simply transliterate without taking into account difference of
phonetics between regions speaking variants of the same language.
Finally, not all Indian share the "same" subset of characters. It's just
unfortunate that you think that because the ISCII standard tried to "unify"
them in the same encoding model, but still with distinct charsets.
Indic scripts have much less in common than Greek, Latin and Cyrillic. They
are just using smaller sets of letters (at the price of an extremely
elaborate system of contextual forms). Thanks Unicode did not try to
reproduce the "unified" ISCII model, which needs control sequences to switch
from one to the other or to select one explicitly, and the ISCII standard
can work then more or less like an ISO2022 encoding that allows mapping
several charsets in a single 8-bit page.
In each page, some codes are valid and some are not, depending on the
currently selected Indic subset, and the set of conjuncts are unique to each
of them, as well as rules for glyph reordering, and collation.
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