Re: Tibetan Paluta

2017-04-29 21:21 GMT+02:00 Naena Guru via Unicode <unicode_at_unicode.org>:

> Just about the name paluta:
> In Sanskrit, the length of vowels are measured in maaþra (a cognate of the
> word 'meter'). It is the spoken length of a short vowel. In Latin it is
> termed mora. Usually, you have only single and double length vowels. A
> paluþa length is like when you call out somebody from a distance. Pluta is
> a careless use of spelling. Virama and Halanta are two other terms loosely
> used.
>
> Anyway, Unicode is only about DISPLAYING a script: There's a shape here;
> Let's find how to get it by assembling other shapes or by creating a code
> point for it. What is short, long or longer in speech is no concern for
> Unicode.
>

Wrong. Unicode is absolutely not about how to "display" any script (except
symbols and notational symbols). Unicode does not encode glyphs. Unicode
encodes "abstract characters" according to their semantics, in order to
assign them properties allowing meaningful transformations of text and in
order to allow perfoirming searches (with collation algorithms). What is
important is their properties (something that ISO 10646 does not care when
it started the UCS in a separate project, ignoring how it would be used,
focusing too much on apparent glytphs (and introducing lot of "compatiblity
characters" that would not have been encoded otherwise, and creating some
havoc in logical processing.

Anyway Unciode makes some exceptions to the logical model only for
roundtrip comptaibility with other standards that used another encoding
model widely used, notably in Thai: these are the exception where there are
"prepended" letters. There was some havoc also for some scripts in India
because of roundtrip compatiblity with an Indian standard (criticized by
many users of Tamil and some other Southern Indic scripts that don't follow
directly the paradigm created for getting some limited transliteration with
Devanagari: that initial desire was abandoned but the legacy Indic scripts
in India were imported as is to Unicode)
Received on Mon May 01 2017 - 00:18:16 CDT