It might be foolish to jump into the recent discussion, but I was reading
a named Web site called Acharya, in English, about rendering and computer
processing of the major languages of India. Here's one pertinent quote,
from one of its pages:
<http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/multi_sys/uni_iscii.html>

"Introduction:

There are many different factors to be considered in selecting codes for
representing the letters and other written shapes in the writing system
for a language. In the context of languages of India, one is not surprised
to see more than one script in use for some of the languages. This is
possible because the script reflects the sounds of the individual aksharas
and thus the same phonetic information may be written in many different
scripts so long as there is some well defined way of writing the aksharas
in each script. The eleven or so scripts in use in the country do carry
phonetic information in a fairly uniform manner across the languages."

That Web site <http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/index.html> defines an akshara,
and as I understand it, starting from sounds of aksharas to render a given
script works better than starting from Unicode elements and combining
them. (Please hang on, for a bit!) They propose a large set of code
points that permit rendering aksharas more directly, rather than by
combining their elements. They state, iirc, that rendering text from
Unicode elements can work well, but the text files used to create that
text are likely to be almost useless for such processes as sorting,
searching, and the like. The reason this site's ideas seem worthy of
attention is that they propose a multilingual basis for creating text
files that can be searched and sorted with reasonably-simple routines. (A
routine, in programming, is a set of instructions that does a specific
task, or a collection of related tasks -- approx. definition. FOLDOC is a
very good ref.)

As to the number of aksharas they propose, it could be maybe 13,000, but
that seems essentially unnecessary; a pracical set seems to be more like a
few hundred.

After spending some hours last night studying the site, I've concluded
that it has some of the attributes of a collection of well-written
articles that unfortunately need an editor-in-chief, and there is
apparently none. There are links, of course, and (as I think of it) in the
manner of ancient sacred documents with marginal commentary, they have a
very-useful right sidebar (it really is a vertical bar!) with summaries
and commentary on the main body of text. Beyond doubt, the authors are
very intelligent, educated, literate, and concerned about computer usage
of their own scripts. I found the site to be very interesting.

While I surely like and respect Unicode, I'm also aware that it does have
limitations. At least, it's extensible!

Please understand that I'm only an amateur, and might misunderstand what
I've read.

Dipping a toe into academic matters...

Best regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath