Re: LAO LETTER FO SUNG and LAO LETTER FO TAM

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Oct 17 2005 - 09:16:53 CST

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    From: "Andrew West" <andrewcwest@gmail.com>
    >I have received the following communication about a possible confusion
    > in the names of a couple of Lao letters (U+0E9D and U+0E9F). I don't
    > know anything about Lao or Thai, so I'd be grateful if anyone could
    > let me know whether the Unicode names for these characters are correct
    > or not.
    >
    > <quote>
    > Je tiens à vous signaler que deux consonnes laotiennes qui
    > correspondent d'ailleurs aux deux consonnes thaïes sont bien à leur
    > place correcte, mais on s'est trompé en leur donnant leur nom en
    > laotien: Fo Soung est entre Pho Soung et Pho tam lequel est suivi de
    > Fo tam.
    > Les dessins des lettres sont donc corrects et à leur place, c'est le
    > nom qui doit changer. Idem en thaï: Fo Fan (Soung) doit être avant Fo
    > Fa (tam).
    > </quote>

    In other words, the representative glyphs and the alphabetic order is
    correct (so is the encoding itself), but the names only are wrong for

    > U+0E9E : LAO LETTER PHO TAM
    > U+0E9F : LAO LETTER FO SUNG

    which are swapped, as well as:
    > U+0E1E : THAI CHARACTER PHO PHAN
    > U+0E1F : THAI CHARACTER FO FAN

    Unfortunately, names are normally immutable, unlike representative glyphs.
    But I think that swapping the glyphs would make more damage, breaking
    existing texts and collations, than just changing the confusive names (which
    are most often not used in implementations as well as in fonts).

    This should be an exception to the rule of immutability of normative
    character names, because this is an editorial error that should not have
    happened. I think that such change this should require an immediate "Public
    Review Issue", and a communication to ISO/IEC 10646, so that they can
    statuate on this case...

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