From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] A simple question
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In-Reply-To: <00f601c34772$215ea340$b9844051@insultant.net>; from boyd, rounin on Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 08:03:20AM +0200
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 08:11:13 +0200
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On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 08:03:20AM +0200, boyd, rounin wrote:
>=20
> well if unicode was organised so that each language had its own
> code space it would be a trivial problem.
>=20
Well, I'm assuming a total rewrite of the alphabets anyway. Although
ideograms really don't fit in the same representation space.

> look at latin 1 (for want of a better term): it covers a whole bunch
> of languages, with different collation sequences and many of the
> glyphs are not actually _real letters_.
>=20
Yes, that's where composition came into the picture.  But that
needs to be clever, with character scaling to make room for accents
becoming more than a trivial nuisance.  Technically, it doesn't
matter what a symbol stands for, as much as it needs to be _presented_
in an unambiguous, clear fashion.

Whether it's a pronunciation issue or a distinct character (is the
final letter in "papa" and "pap=E0" a pronunciation aid or a different
character in the sense of differentiating words with different
meanings?) is not important to its internal or external repreentation.

But I do get your point that overlaps of alphabets for different
languages does add complexity.  Maybe there is enough scope in
UTF-8 or Unicode to allow many-to one internal to external mappings.

The existence of a phonetic alphabet is a different issue, too vast
to address here (without composition capabilities, specially).
Suffice to say even in Plan 9 there are fonts that do not have all
the useful glyphs in them, so whereas UTF-8 is a great abstraction
for internal purposes, there should be a more definite standard
about externalising it.

++L