Re: Tibetan/Burmese/Khmer

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Sat Jan 18 1997 - 10:38:30 EST


At 11:04 -0500 1997-01-18, Maurice J Bauhahn wrote:
>
>> >If Khmer was substituted on to an ISCII encoding, several consonants would
>> >need to be added out of alphabetic order and some vowels added. For speed
>> >of sorting that would be disadvantageous...but if economic considerations
>> >made it necessary, Cambodians would have to put up with the
>> >inconvenience.
>>
>> I can't imagine that it would be *that* expensive in terms of speed.
>> Certainly the closer a script is to a Brahmic encoding, the cheaper it is
>> to adapt from software built for an existing Brahmic encoding.
>
>I wish I could calculate the theoretical limits to settle that question.
>All I know is the difficulty which I have experienced in creating a
>sorting algorythm for the language. There are five levels of dependencies
>with up to 35 members in each dependency. Of course the real language does
>not have all combinations but the variations are enough that a simple
>dictionary lookup does not seem practical.

You may be interested in the work of SC22/WG20, Internationalization, which
has a project on sorting 10646. Certainly we will want your input on Khmer!
A draft of the sort established at present is on my web site; Alain LaBonté
can tell you how to get hold of the text of the Committee Draft.

>> Maurice, will you please write a paper with examples and submit it to WG2
>> and to the UTC for scrutiny? A paper in HTML format would be nice.
>
>I would love to do that, but have no idea how to incorporate Khmer script
>examples into HTML without a bunch of little giffs! Are there any working
>browsers which take advantage of the proposed RFC2070
>(Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language)?

Use gifs please.

>Please post a URL to a document which describes what 'root' does mean when
>refering to Tibetan.

Garghghgh. I will look. Chandra Das' dictionary discusses this I think,
unless it's Hannah's grammar.

--
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



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:33 EDT