L2/04-042

Subject: Liaison report, Script Encoding Initiative
To: Unicode Technical Committee
From: Deborah Anderson
Date: 28 January 2004


ILCAA Report
>From December 17-19, 2003, an international conference organized by Peri Bhaskararao, Research Institute for the Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, took place in Tokyo. Unfortunately, Rick was not able to attend, but Andrew Glass reported that the meeting went well and he was "encouraged to see so many scholars from India taking a keen interest in Unicode and being relatively fluent in its methods and principles." Andrew presented his (and Stefan Baums') Brahmi proposal, which unifies all the pre-modern into one encoding, and circulated his proposal for further comments. Andrew noted that one paper, by Prof. Sengupta, raised the issue of using of virāma following vowels, which he would prefer to render with ZWJ, an approach which was adopted by Andrew and Stefan in their Brahmi proposal.  The papers from the meeting were collected and published in a book, International Symposium on Indic Scripts: Past and Future. Twenty papers, discussing both historic and modern scripts, are included.

Byzantine Musical Symbols
Nick Nicholas (U of Melbourne and TLG, UC Irvine) is checking thoroughly the Byzantine Musical Notation block and has reported many errors in the block. He is creating a document for the UTC listing the errors and a Technical Note on Byzantine Musical Notation. He will also be seeking input from the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (MMB).

N'ko
A preliminary version of the N'ko proposal has been written by Michael Everson in conjunction with Mamadi Doumbouya and Mamadi Baba Diané, but additional information is needed in order to complete the proposal. There may be a meeting in Sweden (organized by the International Biblioteket, the Swedish International Library) in late March which will, hopefully, gather together specialists in N'ko. A funding request to bring Michael to Sweden for the meeting has been made.  This would enable many of the outstanding questions to be answered.

Missing Historic Cyrillic Characters
David Birnbaum, University of Pittsburgh, is still collecting documentation which will be incorporated into a proposal for some missing historic Cyrillic characters.

Linguistic Symbols: Raised theta
Another request for this was received; Peter Constable reports that he is including this in a submission to the UTC.

Tibetan
Work is ongoing with the Tibetan scholars. Two Bhutanese marks for Dzongkha (N2694) were proposed L2/04-007 by Michael Everson and Chris Fynn.

Medieval Nordic
Work continues by Michael Everson in conjunction with Odd Einar Haugen (Nordisk institutt) on a medieval Nordic proposal, as part of the MUFI (Medieval Unicode Font Initiative) project, www.hit.uib.no/mufi/.

Tifinagh
Patrick Andries will be traveling to Morocco in mid-February and anticipates having a final version of the Tifinagh proposal that specifically deals with the needs of Morocco by mid- to late March. 

Cham
I inquired on progress on the Cham proposal with Ngo Thanh Nhan, who worked on the ISO WG2 Cham proposal, and he reports he has some new data and will check with Prof Mussay and Prof Bui Khanh before submitting any new script proposal.

Vedic Accents
A scholar from Harvard, Michael Witzel, and P. Scharf from Brown University, have offered to make comments on Vedic accents.