RE: Version 2.0 and Devanagari

From: Michel Suignard (michelsu@microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Mar 25 1996 - 13:22:46 EST


Michael, I don't think your message reflects exactly the situation. In
the WG2 meeting in Antalya, Turkey, a representative from India came
with the new ISCII standard. He was not asking to move anything. He was
asking for a new row to put the latest ISCII layout. The ISCII standard
(my copy is dated December 1991 with a January 1993 reprint) aims at
encoding "a common alphabet for all the Indian scripts [] made possible
by their common origin from the same ancient Brahmi script." (extract
from the standard).
So clearly this is very different from what is already coded in Unicode.
If we see a bit more often our Indian collegues attending WG2 meetings
(nobody from India has come to a WG2 meetig since then) and when (more?)
commercial applications are developped for the Indian natives languages
I would assume that the issue will have to be revisited. I wouldn't be
surprised that at that some time we have to create a new row for
'Brahmi'. And it may lead eventually to the deprecation of the other
Indian script encoding.

Michel
>----------
>From: everson@indigo.ie[SMTP:everson@indigo.ie]
>Sent: Saturday, March 23, 1996 10:10 AM
>To: unicode@unicode.org
>Cc: iso10646@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu
>Subject: Re: Version 2.0 and Devanagari
>
>At 10:28 1996-03-23, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:
>>
>>My understanding is that the Unicode first draft encoding for Devanagari
>>followed an obsolete version of the Indian National Code for Information
>>Interchange. Has this been rectified in subsequent editions?
>
>Naabhuut. There are some old SC2/WG2 documents about this, proposing
>such a
>change, but WG2 and Unicode share the philosophy that ISO10646/Unicode
>characters not be moved unless for very special reasons. This happened
>for
>Korean Hangul very recently. Since the mapping between the new ISCII
>and
>10646 is (I believe, though I have not verified this for myself)
>one-to-one, it is not likely that such a change would be entertained.
>The
>LINK character is not currently part of the ISO10646/Unicode, though it
>has
>been proposed for inclusion recently. Evamasti....
>
>Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta
>15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire (Ireland)
>Gutháin: +353 1 478-2597, +353 1 283-9396
>http://www.indigo.ie/egt
>27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire
>
>
>



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