From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Mon Jun 27 2005 - 02:47:39 CDT
On Saturday, June 25th, 2005 23:55Z James Kass wrote:
> Michael Everson wrote,
>
>> The Unicode encoding is based on ISCII, not transliteration.
As far as I know, in ISCII there are shared codepoints; in Unicode, there
are differentiated.
So while ISCII implements "automatic translitteration" (just change the
reference script), Unicode went one step farther and did replicate the
letters, thus opened a way to translitterate using shifts (and I am not
aware this is commonly implemented because of the many corner cases; only
between Nagari and Gujarati, or between Telugu and Kannada could it be
easily done), but certainly does not require it.
Another important point is that ISCII order is not innocent (neither is
ASCII), but it is not the "obvious" order either, it has been tailored
toward Hindi collation order (hence candrabindu before bindu before a, while
traditional Sanskrit order has a+bindu after au).
It is the same as us poor Spanishs which are empeached to have our beloved ñ
in the correct place by the combined Franco-English imperialism ;-).
>> Brahmic scripts all have the same structure, Tamil included, though
>> Tamil lost some of the original Brahmic letters.
>> The encoding is based on ISCII, not transliteration.
>
> If Unicode is based on ISCII and ISCII is based on transliteration,
> then Unicode is transliteration-based with respect to Indic script
> encoding.
I disagree. Translitteration is not a transitive process. For exemple, if
you translitterate Greek into Cyrillic, and you translitterate the result to
Latin, you will end up with something pretty strange, that people will not
accept as translitteration.
Even if both translitterations are perfectly reversible;
and in the Indic/ISCII/Unicode case, these translitterations are not
perfect, in general.
Antoine
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