Re: Saprutum Script

kam@CARROT.CLARA.NET wrote:


>>If either the ligatured form, or the unligatured form, is fairly rare,
>>then the Unicode character ZWJ can be inserted to create a
>>ligature, or ZWNJ to prevent one.\

I note that I forgot to explain these:  Zero Width Joiner and Zero Width
Non Joiner, respectively.


> The <e> in the "Romanised" transliteration would convert to ZWNJ

Yes, that looks right.

> Does this mean that we're basically trying to code phonemes? That each
> font (where ligatures are involved) requires it's own set of mapping
> rules -- Sanskrit must be a nightmare.

Inevitably so, since exactly which ligatures exist in a font depends
on the font.  Modern font formats have ligature tables, showing which
character sequences should generate a specific glyph.


> I came across a UNICODE slot for the Phoenician Alphabet which is just a
> a "font" of the 22 consonant NW Semitic (ie Hebrew) script, even though
> the letter forms look very different.

Unicode is a practical, not a theoretical, character set; that means
many compromises have been made.  In this case, the principle is that
when two writing systems are utterly distinct, such that people who read
one cannot read the other without special training, they are encoded
separately, even if they are isomorphic.

Similarly, Glagolitic will be encoded separately from
Cyrillic, because we do not want plain Glagolitic text to appear as
Cyrillic or (much worse) vice versa.

--
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