From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 03:43:08 EDT
Jony Rosenne wrote on 06/26/2003 12:16:22 AM:
> When, in the Bible, one sees two vowels on a given consonant, it isn't
so.
That's silly. When one sees two vowels on a given consonant in the Bible,
it *is* so: the two vowels are written there. It may not correspond to
actual phonology, ie what is spoken, but as has been made clear on many
occasions, Unicode is not encoding phonology, it is encoding text. And in
relation to text, your statement is simply wrong.
> There is one vowel for the consonant one sees, and another vowel for an
> invisible consonant. The proper way to encode it is to use some code to
> represent the invisible consonant. Then the problem mentioned below does
not
> arise.
The idea of an invisible consonant would amount to encoding a phonological
entity, which is the kind of thing that was at one time approved for Khmer
(invisible characters representing inherent vowels), but later turned into
an albatross, and when I proposed the same thing (invisible inherent
vowel) for Syloti Nagri, it was made very clear to me that it would not go
down well with UTC.
Also, the proposed solution of an invisible consonant would leave
unresolved the problem of meteg-vowel ordering distinctions, while the
alternate proposal of having meteg and vowels all with a class of 230
solves both problems at once. Two ad hoc solutions (one for multi-vowel
ordering, and another for meteg-vowel ordering) must certainly be far less
preferred for one motivated solution (having characters with canonical
combining classes that are appropriate for the writing behaviours
exhibited).
I invite people to review the discussions from the unicoRe list from last
December, at which time everyone (including you, Jony) were all concluding
that the solution which I proposed in L2/03-195 was the best solution to
pursue.
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
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