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

>
> Say you're trying to prepare a coherent change proposal for
>submission
> via http://www.unicode.org/reporting.html . That's why I am
>trying to
> understand if there is a non-geographic unity to 'SE Asian
>scripts'.

And I am coming at it from another angle again. I have been learning
the Mandombe script - it could possibly be considered the same type
of script as Syllabics, using orientation for consonants and shape
for vowels, also combining consonants and vowels in syllables, but
no inherent vowel.

> There is a language issue, in that the principle of a default vowel
> only works (worked?) well for the Indic languages.

That is the issue right there for Tamil.

>
> I wasn't joking when I suggested that visual Tamil could be

handled as

> a variant of Thai.

I have decided that the present keyboards now available for Unicode
Tamil work well enough for me - they just weren't available a year
ago. But thanks anyway :)

>
> This doesn't help my search for a concept unifying SE Asian

scripts.

And I am looking for a concept unifying Syllabics and ???

I have also being playing catchup on some other issues, like
polytonic Greek. I can input and post the precomposed letters with
all the accents and spiris using Tahoma font and it displays well in
most browsers. However, how are decomposed or 'combining' diacritcs
supposed to work and do they? Sometimes I go to some other site with
classical Greek and it is still a jumble of empty boxes.

Suzanne