L2/08-126

Source: Eric Muller
Subject: UTC Letter Ballot: Myanmar in Unicode 5.1
Date: March 3, 2008

Dear Unicode Corporate, Institutional, and Supporting Members:

Please find below a letter ballot to approve changes regarding Myanmar in
Unicode 5.1.

You have 20 days, until March 25, in which to respond. However, we ask
that you respond as quickly as possible. Once we can determine a majority,
the results will be announced. Send your vote, one vote per member
company, to me using the above subject line. If you have any questions as
to the rules of letter ballots, please see the UTC Procedures, section 11
at http://www.unicode.org/unicode/consortium/tc-procedures.html#11.

Regards,
Eric Muller,
UTC Vice-Chair

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Unicode Letter Ballot:
It has come to the attention of the Unicode officers that while the UTC
explicitly approved the character additions for Myanmar in 5.1, it did not
explicitly approve related changes in the representation of text. The
purpose of this letter ballot is to seek explicit approval of those
changes:
1.      representation of kinzi by <U+1004, U+103A, U+1039> rather than
<U+1004, U+1039>. The purpose of this change is to disambiguate the kinzi
form of U+1004 nga from the case where nga enters in a regular conjunct
form.
2.      allowance for an U+103A asat after the first consonant of a
cluster, when this asat indicates that the consonant is a double-acting
consonant (aka contractions)
3.      in the syllable order (documented in table 11.3), inversion of the
order of the vowels above and the vowels below
Furthermore, because the 5.0 block description needs pervasive changes to
bring it in line with the decisions above, the Editorial Committee seeks
approval to include a consolidated block description in the 5.1 text. A
draft of the revised block description for 5.1 is available at
<http://www.unicode.org/~emuller/southasia/myanmar/block_description.html>
; this draft may be further modified editorially by the Editorial
Committee. This revised block description would replace the text under
"Myanmar additions" in the 5.1. text approved at the last UTC meeting.
This letter ballot is a simple yes/no vote covering the three points above
and the principle of a consolidated block description in 5.1:
[ ] agree
[ ] disagree
Should this ballot fail, the current 5.1 draft text (at
<http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/>) would be retained. In
practice this would mean that the representation of Myanmar text in
Unicode would be left in an indeterminate state.
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