From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Jul 18 2005 - 14:52:10 CDT
Andreas Prilop wrote:
> The Unicode range "Latin Extended Additional" includes many letters
> marked for "Indic transliteration". None of these are really necessary
> because you can use combining marks such as U+0323 and U+0325.
Correct.
> The precomposed characters 1E38, 1E39, 1E5C, 1E5D suggest that
> the Unicode Consortium confused the letters "with dot below"
> (denoting retroflex/cerebral consonants) and "with ring below"
> (denoting vocalic R and L).
Actually, the *Unicode Consortium* did not confuse these things.
All characters in the range U+1E00..U+1E99 and U+1EA0..U+1EF9
(precomposed Vietnamese letters) were in DIS-1 of ISO 10646-1
dating from 1991 and were added to the Unicode Standard as the
result of the merger of Unicode 1.0 and 10646 in the period
1992-1993. None of these characters were in the Unicode 1.0
repertoire, as that standard did indeed expect that all such
combinations would simply make use of the combining marks.
As for the annotations in the names list, "Indic transliteration",
those are to give some indication of the original intended
field of use which was the rationale for the inclusion of
these characters in the 10646-1 repertoire in the first place.
A note "Indic transliteration" should not be over-interpreted
as meaning "Sufficient for all Indic transliteration and
intended for Sanskrit syllabic liquids, despite the fact that
established transliterations now use dot below for retroflex
articulation and ring below for vocalization, but we're confused
and don't care about conventions, so insist that you use the
wrong forms." ;-)
Instead, just think of it as a guidepost regarding why those
characters got in (and they were, indeed, culled from some of
the kinds of sources Richard Wordingham mentions), but then go
ahead and do the right thing to represent Indic transliteration
correctly for whatever orthographic tradition you are following.
--Ken
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