On Jun 2, 2004, at 10:25 PM, John Cowan wrote:

> Ethiopic and UCAS could easily have been done abugida-style with
> just mandatory ligatures to generate the appropriate glyphs, not
> even full Indic shaping.
>
> I think the important factor was the way the users thought of the
> characters -- as syllabograms.
>

I don't recall precisely what was the deciding factor in the case of
UCAS, but I believe you're correct with regard to Ethiopic. Yi was an
interesting case because each syllable with the *fourth* tone can be
generated by adding a diacritic to the form of the syllable for the
third tone; but in this case, we decided that having a mixed model
(precomposed for three of the four tones, composing for the fourth)
wasn't a good idea.

========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@...
jhjenkins@...
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/