Last call for ISO 15924-based updates
Doug Ewell
doug at ewellic.org
Fri Mar 13 01:46:24 CET 2009
John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:
> The whole point of the Zinh code is to signal that the diacritic
> changes its script depending on the diacriticized letter. The acute
> accent, for example, has no script of its own; it is understood as a
> Latin accent when placed on a Latin letter, but as a Greek accent when
> placed on a Greek letter.
What Gérard may or may not be aware of, and what powers this entire
explanation, is that in Unicode, a diacriticized letter may be
represented as two encoded characters, one for the base letter and one
for the diacritic. For example, "a with acute" may be encoded as
U+00E1, or it may be encoded as U+0061 plus U+0301. In the second case,
the detached acute accent U+0301 would have the "inherited script"
nature.
This is different from ISO 8859-1 and most other character encodings,
where "a with acute" can only be represented as a single precomposed
character; and it explains why the concept of "inherited script" exists.
--
Doug Ewell * Thornton, Colorado, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
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