Soyombo empty letter frame

Mark E. Shoulson mark at kli.org
Wed Jan 4 19:54:17 CST 2017


On 01/04/2017 04:18 PM, eduardo marin wrote:
>
> The Soyombo proposal is beautiful, but it is missing a very important 
> character in my opinion: 
> http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15004-soyombo.pdf 
> <http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15004-soyombo.pdf>
>
> Encoding an empty letter frame will allow for its proper description 
> in plain text (as it is clear in the proposal itself), it could be 
> used as an stylized cursor in text processors and also we could make 
> zwj sequences such that combining with consonants makes it only render 
> the nucleus.
>

According to the proposal:

    In the proposed encoding a combination of frame and nucleus is
    considered an atomic letter.... This approach enhances the
    conceptualization and identification of letters in the script; for
    instance, the letter ‘ka’ refers inherently to the fully-formed (X)
    and not to the nucleus (X).

In other words, they are explicitly rejecting the model considering the 
"frame" as an item in its own right.  I realize that you are not calling 
for redefining all the letters in terms of frame+nucleus, but encoding 
the frame seems to be something the proposers deliberately decided 
against doing.  In calling for encoding the frame (and why just one 
frame?  Wouldn't you want both the "closed" and "open" ones?), I think 
you really are going against what seems to be a design principle of the 
proposers.  Which of course you are completely entitled to do: just that 
you probably are better off talking it over with the proposers directly, 
to learn their thinking and so they can learn yours.

~mark
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