Re: New property for reordrant dependent vowels reordering?

From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Wed Sep 07 2005 - 17:36:24 CDT

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    Kent Karlsson wrote:

    > Peter Constable wrote:
    >
    >> > It seems to me that you are going beyond what is currently spelled
    >> > out by Unicode. The discussion about the joiners does not mention
    >> > how they interact with vowel signs.
    >>
    >> True; it is silent on that issue. For better or worse, in the context
    > of
    >> that silence we made an implementation decision. That decision is not
    >> inconsistent with what the Standard specifies.
    >
    > It still appears to me that requesting virama to be visible is mostly
    > orthogonal to requesting a reordrant vowel to "reorder less".

    Isn't that because you think that a virama codepoint between consonants in a
    script encoded using the 'virama model' has got something to do with a
    real-world virama? Would you think the same if the script's encoding used
    the coeng model or had a separate encoding for either (1) non-final
    consonants of a cluster (no examples, I believe) or (2) non-initial
    consonants of a cluster (e.g. Tibetan)?

    I see it quite differently because I think it is a matter of what
    orthographic syllables the sequence of vowelless consonants (as you see it)
    is split into - in the output if there is licence to to do it differently to
    what is specified in the sequence of codepoints as the ideal form. I
    suppose one may need to cater for a dependency of vowel placement on the
    requested grouping of consonants into orthographic syllables as opposed to
    the delivered grouping. Does this exist in any real language? I quote from
    the first post Gautam Sengupta made to indic@unicode.org on 7 September 2005
    GMT:

    > - p127 entry for "peer VI", last word contains dda + halant + sa +
    > reph
    > - p142, entry for "range, N", 3rd word contains matra i + nga +
    > halant +
    > k.ta

    There are no such words in Hindi, contemporary or old. No native
    speaker will recognise those sequences as "well-formed". A halant
    after a vowel sign and a reph after a halant are ill-formed.

    (end quote)

    The final sentence is language and script dependent - Burmese uses a
    combination of vowel and virama for one vowel. However, it seems that not
    even CrrC (in what language?) will give <halant, repha>.

    > Further, I think this is a "behavioural" issue, rather than just an
    > implementation issue. There should be a common (read standard)
    > way of dealing with this, at the character sequence level, independent
    > of how the implementations are built.

    Agreed.

    Richard.



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