Casefolding Sigma (was: Re: IDNAbis PreprocessingDraft)

[Martin Duerst]

At 20:03 08/01/25, Michael Everson wrote:
>At 19:08 +0900 2008-01-25, Martin Duerst wrote:
>
>>Canadian Syllabics "Final" seem to be more like some modifier characters.
>
>Martin! "Seem"? I really don't believe that we should be proceeding with this kind of lackadaisical linguistic na$B}W(Bet$Bq(B
>
>Canadian Syllabics finals are letters. They are prototypically final consonants and often marks of labialization. One *might* call the labializers "modifiers" but one certainly cannot do so for the finals. Your analysis was based on an opinion of the superficial glyph appearance, not on the actual use of the characters.

Oh, I understand. For a syllabic script, that makes perfect sense.
Thanks for helping out. These should definitely be allowed in IDNs,
they are quite like the Thaana marks, except that they (mostly, Sayisi
seems to be somewhat of an exception) denote consonants at the end
of (otherwise open) syllables rather than vowels after consonants.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, I hope you agree with me
that these need to be available in IDN.

>>Two of them even don't have any glyph printed in Unicode 5.0, and there is no explanation in the text, so this is difficult to say with certainty.
>
>What characters do not have glyphs in Unicode 5.0?

U+1424 and U+1426. The names indicate what they might look like,
but my copy of the book really has nothing there, neither in the
glyph chart (p. 684) nor in the character list (p. 687), unless
it's printed in some invisible ink or so.

>>For New Tai Lue, these are in some sense composed forms of a base consonant and a virama. If they are dealt with in a similar way to other Indic scripts, I guess these variants should be separate.
>
>Have you read the proposals to encode New Tai Lue, which describes the script and its characters? There is no Virama encoded for New Tai Lue.

Yes. I didn't say that New Tai Lue has a Virama. I just said that they
are the equivalent of what would be encoded with a consonant and a virama
if New Tai Lue were encoded using the Indic model, and that following
the logic of that model, this distinction (virama or not, in a logical
sense, independent of whether it's encoded explicitly or not), the
distinction between final and non-final in New Tai Lue should be kept
in IDNs in the same way as the distinction between consonant and
consonant+virama is kept in Indic IDNs.

Again, please correct me if I'm wrong.

>My goodness, this activity can be disheartening.

For an effort such as IDN, it's very important to have experts
from all kinds of fields. Your input is therefore very appreciated.
If everybody on this list would just say things you always had to
agree with, you wouldn't have to be on this list, or would you?

Regards,    Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp