Last call for ISO 15924-based updates

Phillips, Addison addison at amazon.com
Wed Mar 18 16:53:56 CET 2009


The tags in ISO 15924 are used to identify what script a certain character has in Unicode’s list of characters. Unicode characters with a script property of Zinh inherit their script FROM THE PRECEDING CHARACTER in a piece of text. They don’t inherit it from the script tag.

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.

From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of CE Whitehead
Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 8:44 AM
To: ietf-languages at iana.org
Subject: Last call for ISO 15924-based updates


Hi.

Doug, thanks for your very very patient reply to me.  A subtag like your example,
> <span lang="en">
> Send us your re<span lang="en-Zinh">[U+0301]</span>sume<span
> lang="en-Zinh">[U+0301]</span>.
> </span>
at least would not hurt a document, so no need to tell people not to tag documents with it.
So perhaps the current description,
"Code for inherited script"
is sufficient.
(However, I am still confused . . .
> In Unicode, every coded character has a script property, and in
particular, general-purpose combining characters like U+0301 have a
script property of "inherited," which means that they temporarily assume
the script property of the base character that precedes them.  In this
example, the acute accent inherits the script property of "Latin" from
the base letter U+0065.  The combining acute accent is not permanently
assigned to the Latin script because it could reasonably be used in a
different context with some other script, such as Cyrillic.
>Now, I'd like someone to explain to me the benefit of writing something
like this, in a context such as HTML where BCP 47 language tags can be
used to tag arbitrary sections of text:
> <span lang="en">
> Send us your re<span lang="en-Zinh">[U+0301]</span>sume<span
> lang="en-Zinh">[U+0301]</span>.
> </span>
Fine, this much makes perfect sense to me; no problem at all; now for one more incredibly stupid question:  if the Unicode character automatically inherits its script from the script subtag (in all cases) why then is a code like 'zinh' needed at all?  That's where my confusion rests.  I gather from what people say that in some cases it is necessary to make clear that the script is inherited.

Sorry to waste list time on this)

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com<mailto:cewcathar at hotmail.com>


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/attachments/20090318/b7c1e5f7/attachment.htm 


More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list