Re: Major Defect in Combining Classes of Tibetan Vowels

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Jun 25 2003 - 16:38:13 EDT

  • Next message: John Hudson: "Re: Major Defect in Combining Classes of Tibetan Vowels"

    > At 18:26 +0100 2003-06-25, Michael Everson wrote:
    >
    > >You'd like to think so. But "Deprecate TIBETAN THINGY and add
    > >TIBETAN THINGY BIS so that we can fix the problem" is utterly
    > >ridiculous.
    >
    > And by that I mean, given the TWO standards Unicode and ISO/IEC
    > 10646, adding duplicate characters is frowned upon, so it should be
    > less preferable than UTC fixing broken classes if they really are
    > broken.

    This neglects the fact that for the Unicode Standard (although
    not ISO/IEC 10646, for which combining classes and normalization
    are irrelevant), destabilization of normalization is as
    serious a business as adding duplicate characters. That is
    why Mark chimed in earlier with:

    > Michael, that is like saying "move the bloody character" or "remove
    > the bloody character".

    This issue should not be framed as if it were one where
    character identity is the higher glory, enshrined in
    the superior standard, so that to "fix" a problem, the
    lesser standard, the Unicode Standard, should simply relent
    on its own stability guarantees. Instead, the two standards
    have synchronized guarantees regarding character identity,
    but the Unicode Standard has its own scope beyond 10646,
    and in that realm it must respect its own guarantees of
    stability, because the users of that standard depend on
    them.

    In any case, even with the clarification that there are
    instances, in Tibetan contractions, of cooccurrence of
    shabkyu and vowels above on the same consonant stack, I
    am failing to see how the particular combining class
    assignment for U+0F74 is creating any serious problem for
    the representation of such Tibetan data.

    --Ken



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