Re: Unicode and Abugida Saga (was: wikipedia)

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>
> --- 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!

I tried in this post!

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/message/6127

>
> 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.

That is a point - a map and an historical overview of national and
political boundaries would be more useful. Then a timeline, with a
list of available technologies by date.

Anyway, I have been trying to sort out all the misnomers for
Syllabics for another project and it led back to the "featural
syllabary" term in Unicode. I wasn't looking for trouble, Richard,
believe it or not.

>The differences between an alphabet, a pure abjad
> and a pure syllabary are immaterial for Unicode.

True.

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

Yes, this has been very confusing for me.

> 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.

Legacy standards? - or is there a difference because of the
difference in language families? That is why Tamil is so different
from other Indic scripts. It is from the same *script* family
historically but there are so many conceptual differences. The
concept of how the writing system works seems to vary from the Indic
language family considerably.

Suzanne