--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@...> wrote:

> Me too. Almost as depressing as reading the Uni... well you know
> what I mean to say but I don't want to be censored.

The appropriate sanction would be for you to be forced to submit
corrections to Unicode!

On the 'Unicode and abugida' saga, the real problem is that the
concepts of abjad and abugida are almost irrelevant to what Unicode
needs to consider. The differences between an alphabet, a pure abjad
and a pure syllabary are immaterial for Unicode. Likewise it is
immaterial that the Philippine scripts are abugidas - they may as well
be alphabets with accents. When they say a script is an abugida, they
are primarily referring to two characterisitic features of the Brahmi
family:

1. Stacking of consonants (the original means of indicating a
vowelless consonant) and its modern complications.

2. Scattering of vowel marks about the consonant (stack).

If we compare a pointed abjad to an Indo-Chinese abugida, there's not
much difference from an IT perspective:

A. A consonant may have a mark to indicate its vowel, lack of a vowel,
or silence. (I've made gemination a secondary character, like tone,
register shift and fricativisation.)

B. Absence of a mark may have an implicit meaning - e.g., largely
depending on position in the word, silence or lack of a vowel in
Hebrew or Arabic and the implicit vowel (actually not uniquely
indicated) or lack of a vowel in the Brahmi scripts.

C. The pointed abjads explicitly mark all vowels; the Indo-Chinese
abugidas explicitly mark silent letters.

Implicit vowels are chiefly significant because ISCII coalesced the
two vowel stripping mechanisms (stacking and virama) - a neat idea
that has caused endless confusion.

There is an issue that the Unicode Standard has no consistency in how
much information it gives about a spelling system. It gives quite a
bit of information about some languages with their own scripts, but
says nothing about how Burmese or Hungarian (let alone Irish) spelling
works.

One thing that is troubling me is the division of Indic scripts. Can
the division between South Asian and South East Asian scripts be
anything but a geographical division. There are common usages in the
Indo-Chinese scripts outside Burma, but the use for Burmese and Tai Le
seems to lack specifically Indo-Chinese features. I do wonder how Mon
would complicate these issues.

Richard.