--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:

> suzmccarth scripsit:
>
> > This seems to me to be the only logical answer. I can't think

why

> > else Tamil couldn't have precomposed characters for aksharas

since

> > Canadian Syllabics works for 3 languages with fairly different
> > syllable structure, Western Cree, Naskapi and Inuit.
>
> Well, not using the abugida model for the Indic scripts would have
> gobbled up immense numbers of codepoints, since CV and CCV and even
> CCCV are possible in certain languages. (No Indic script is used

for

> only one language.) In addition, the question of which consonants
> are ligatured and which not depends on both the language and the

font.

> It's simpler, all things considered, to use so-called "Brahmic

encoding";

> i.e. to deal with the underlying abugida.
>
> The original proposal for Ethiopic also proposed an abugida-like

encoding,

> though with each vowel encoded whether intrinsic or not. This was

shot

> down, however; although I don't know the details, I suspect the

fact that

> Ethiopic-script users think of their *fidel* as being a N x 5

array of

> related syllabograms was influential.
>
> The Indic languages, however, were encoded following the model of

ISCII,

> which followed the model of typewriters.
>
> Unicode is a *practical* encoding above all.

John. I appreciate your detailed answers but wish to delve deeper if
I may. Tamil also has an array, a matrix of syllables, a syllabary,
so they call it. Tamil also has fewer phonemes than other Indic
languages, both Indic and Dravidian. It has fewer syllables than
Korean. I realize that the large number of Indic scripts is
probably the biggest argument against precomposed units.

The old typewriter input method, which we also used, had visual
sequence input and while useless on the internet and no good for
ligatures, shaping and rendering has a certain logic to it - it
imitated handwriting.

>
> --
> Barry gules and argent of seven and six, John Cowan
> on a canton azure fifty molets of the second. jcowan@...
> --blazoning the U.S. flag

http://www.ccil.org/~cowan