Re: Defined Private Use was: SSP default ignorable characters

From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Wed Apr 28 2004 - 22:01:42 EDT

  • Next message: Mark E. Shoulson: "Re: Defined Private Use was: SSP default ignorable characters"

    John Cowan wrote:

    >The other and unrelated problem with Tengwar is how to encode the
    >vowel signs. The trouble here is that in some orthographies of
    >some languages (notably English), the vowel signs represent
    >vowels that phonetically *precede* the consonant they are written on.
    >Like the digits, this is unprecedented. Should phonetic ordering
    >be ignored in those cases? Or should the vowel signs not be
    >treated as combining marks? Or do we need two sets of vowel signs?
    >(The related script Sarati does have two visible sets of vowel signs
    >distinguished by position.)
    >
    I would say this should not be a big problem: there should simply be a
    standard order wrt the *writing* (e.g. vowel follows consonant on which
    it is marked) and languages that have different input orders would have
    to handle that in keyboard drivers or text processors or whatever.

    It's not unlike what Hebrew does on a very small scale with its furtive
    patah: the vowel is encoded after the consonant but pronounced before
    it. It may not look too sensible when you read the sequence of
    characters--but who reads the sequence of characters anyway? *Writing*
    the sequence of characters may be a little more tricky, but generally
    things are read more than they are written anyway.

    ~mark



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