Re: Characters LAM and ALIF together (ligature) in Arabic
On 26 Mar 2012, at 09:08, Escape Landsome wrote: The problem is by now (in my mailer) it appears as (the ligature) + ALIF, which is incorrect That is a problem. On the website, it appears as (plain LAM) + (plain ALIF), which is incorrect too That is OK. This ligature was introduced in early arabic fonts and it's a traditional calligraphic 'letter' so, one expects to see it everywhere, but the two plain letters 'lam' + 'alif' is also readable. There are plenty more ligatures possible in ornate arabic, as in greek for instance.
Re: Combining latin small letters with diacritics
On 26 Mar 2012, at 13:35, Denis Jacquerye wrote: So far the linguistic atlases I have seen extensively use this combining letter mechanism, with diacritics changing the meaning of the combining letter or of the base letter. There are a whole lot of notations that could simply be base combining letter + combining diacritics, but if you consider their meaning, would have to be encoded a their own combining letter with diacritics on the model of combining a-umlaut, etc... This is not coherent with the decomposition model. Having some of the combining letters with diacritics encoded as single characters and other combining letters with diacritics encoded as combining letters with separate combining diacritics based on what meaning they have is as erroneous as having new precomposed characters because of their meaning. Would we encode ɛ̱ because it is a specific meaning in some language? Obviously no. Encoding is supposed to be language-independent but that's theoretical, in practice it cannot be independent to _some_ language. And the business-language for encoding seems to have been english so far, at least as far as I understand Unicode. So why are we encoding ä when it is a combining diacritic but not ẽ? That is a reminiscence of the history of type-encoding. The fact that combining c-cedilla is a precedent doesn't make it any saner. For example a-breve is a separate letter in Romanian, and it is as well in the Atlasul linguistic romîn serie noua, just like the a-umlaut is in German dialectology. But in other dialectology works such as Atlas linguistique de la France, a-breve is just a breve a, not a different letter. You'll then end up with combining a-breve as a single diacritic for Romanian but combining a and combining breve for other languages. Yet the non-diacritic forms, i.e. regular letters would be represented by the same character sequence in Romanian or other languages, NFC ă or NFD ă. The same could be said for a-umlaut/diaeresis depending on how people are using it. Denis Moyogo Jacquerye combining_a-breve-1-ALRsn.jpgcombining_a-breve-2-ALRsn.jpg
Re: vertical writing mode of modern Yi?
On 27 March 2012 06:18, suzuki toshiya mpsuz...@hiroshima-u.ac.jp wrote: Is there any typesetted material of modern Yi syllabic script in vertical writing mode? Probably nothing more than titles on book spines and names of government offices written on gate pillars. However, I believe that these examples are sufficient to establish the vertical writing mode of the modern Yi script. My observation is that the standardized Liangshan Yi script that is encoded in Unicode is written vertically with no rotation of glyphs, in the same way that Chinese characters are written vertically. On the spines of the manually written books for old Yi, the situation is same; non-rotated glyphs are laid out vertically. Ah, vertical is the native writing mode, so I should say as on the front cover, non- rotated glyphs are laid out horizontally. That seems reasonable, but as Old Yi was written in a variety of orientations in different times and different places it is hard to agree on what the correct vertical and horizontal layout of Old Yi (or perhaps more correctly, the various Old Yi scripts) should be. Moreover, as Old Yi has not been encoded, and therefore cannot be represented in Unicode (other than using the PUA), the orientation behaviour of Old Yi does not seem particularly relevant to Unicode in general or to UTR#50 (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr50/tr50-3.html) in particular. In the volume for Sichuan dialect (p.751), you can find the glyphs looking like modern-Yi-after-rotation. You may wonder if the volume for Sichuan dialect includes only modern Yi, and it should not be recognized as Old Yi?. In the last page for Sichuan volume (p.889), you can find some glyphs that are not included in modern Yi. Even if it shares many of the same glyphs, the standardized Liangshan Yi syllabary encoded in Unicode is not the same script as the Old Yi script used to represent the same language (Liangshan Yi) prior to standardization of the script, and you cannot really represent any Old Yi texts using Unicode Yi without normalizing the text in a way that would be unacceptable for scholarly purposes. Really, anything written in an Old Yi script is irrelevant to discussions of the behaviour of the standardized Liangshan Yi script, and just causes unnecessary confusion and eventually leads to the definition of incorrect vertical text layout properties for Unicode Yi. Andrew
