Jony Rosenne wrote on 06/26/2003 12:16:22 AM: > When, in the Bible, one sees two vowels on a given consonant, it isn't so.
That's silly. When one sees two vowels on a given consonant in the Bible, it *is* so: the two vowels are written there. It may not correspond to actual phonology, ie what is spoken, but as has been made clear on many occasions, Unicode is not encoding phonology, it is encoding text. And in relation to text, your statement is simply wrong. > There is one vowel for the consonant one sees, and another vowel for an > invisible consonant. The proper way to encode it is to use some code to > represent the invisible consonant. Then the problem mentioned below does not > arise. The idea of an invisible consonant would amount to encoding a phonological entity, which is the kind of thing that was at one time approved for Khmer (invisible characters representing inherent vowels), but later turned into an albatross, and when I proposed the same thing (invisible inherent vowel) for Syloti Nagri, it was made very clear to me that it would not go down well with UTC. Also, the proposed solution of an invisible consonant would leave unresolved the problem of meteg-vowel ordering distinctions, while the alternate proposal of having meteg and vowels all with a class of 230 solves both problems at once. Two ad hoc solutions (one for multi-vowel ordering, and another for meteg-vowel ordering) must certainly be far less preferred for one motivated solution (having characters with canonical combining classes that are appropriate for the writing behaviours exhibited). I invite people to review the discussions from the unicoRe list from last December, at which time everyone (including you, Jony) were all concluding that the solution which I proposed in L2/03-195 was the best solution to pursue. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485
