re: Ordering of scripts in DUCET?

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Dec 02 2008 - 18:52:08 CST


Philippe noted:

> There's at l east a document structure by type of entries:
> - ignored
> - ignorable
> - diacritics
> - symbols and punctuation
> - numbers
> - letters and alphabets.

And that is certainly the case.

> But I've not seen a clear statement about the order of letters
> (or of numbers) according to the script to which
> they belong. From what I've seen, it looks like scripts are
> ordered by the first Unicode/ISO 10646 character block
> in which they appear for the first time, and so you could
> "predict" the layout for future scripts as being more or
> like what is displayed as a preview in the Unicode Road Map.

That really isn't the case, as I indicated in my response.

>
> But there may exist other reasons why this order would not be kept:
> it is more important to keep the DUCET with
> their scripts ordered in a way that is consistant with at least
> one of the major languages that use this script. So
> the effective order is based on what is expected for collating
> this primary language, in order to minimize the
> number of tailoring rules needed for supporting that language
> in its primary collation order (that other languages
> will simply borrow by default, simply because they don't regulate
> these other scripts).

But I think at this point, Philippe has moved on to a different
issue, irrelevant to the question that Henry had asked. What
Philippe is talking about here is the primary order of characters
*within* a script in the table.

What Henry was asking amounts to is the following:

A new script has been added to Unicode for Version 5.2 --
let's say, Vai, for example. Can I predict where that
script will appear in the DUCET table? Would it occur
before (or after) Tifinagh or N'Ko because it is another
African script? Would it occur after Yi because it is
the next block in the standard after the Yi block? Or
would it occur someplace else, and how could I tell?

--Ken



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