OT: Devanagari question

From: D.V. Henkel-Wallace (gumby@henkel-wallace.org)
Date: Tue Nov 14 2000 - 11:14:36 EST


At 06:30 2000-11-14 -0800, Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>But my point was: not even Mr. Ethnologue himself knows exactly *which*
>combinations are meaningful, in all orthographic system. And, clearly, no
>one can figure out which combinations may become meaningful in the *future*
>-- e.g. when a previously unwritten language gets its orthography, or when
>the spelling of an already written language gets changed.

Sadly, it seems unlikely that any furture change or adoption of orthography
will use characters not already supported by the then major computer
systems. In fact the trend seems to be the other way, viz Spain's changing
of its collation rules.

For a minority language (which all remaining unwritten languages are) the
pressure will be strong to use existing combinations (since they won't
constitute a large enough community for people to write special rendering
support).



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