From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sun Dec 21 2003 - 14:33:48 EST
At 01:54 +0100 2003-12-21, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>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.
They have a common structure, which we follow in encoding.
>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.
Nonsense. Of course you can. KA is KA is KA is KA and BHA is BHA is
BHA is BHA. The *reading rules* for pronouncing what's been written
differ, but the transliteration is by and large one-to-one. Tamil of
course is an exception, having lost some consonants.
>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.
This doesn't make any sense to me at all.
>Indic scripts have much less in common than Greek, Latin and Cyrillic.
That isn't true.
>They are just using smaller sets of letters (at the price of an extremely
>elaborate system of contextual forms).
I don't know what you are talking about.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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