2 ms·
One of the design goals of Unicode was lossless roundtrip conversions to and from legacy encodings. Legacy Turkish used the ASCII i for lowercase and a characte
by dhosek 1y ago
One of the design goals of Unicode was lossless roundtrip conversions to and from legacy encodings. Legacy Turkish used the ASCII i for lowercase and a character in the 128–255 range for İ.
In contrast, Greek encoded its entire alphabet in the 128–255 range even though, e.g., A and Α have identical appearances (similarly with Cyrillic letters).
This legacy use is also why, e.g., Thai and Hindi handle their vowel setting differently (in Thai, vowels are separate characters input in display order, in Hindi they’re spacing marks input in phonetic order¹) although both have their origins in the Brahmi script.
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1. Some vowels are written before the consonant that they follow phonetically, some come after, a handful come before and after and some are written above or below or modify the shape of the consonant (less sure about this last one—I have meagre Thai skills and almost no Hindi).
- OJFord 1y agoI know nothing of Thai but in Hindi (devanagari) ignoring standalone vowels (अ a) they come after a consonant to modify its pronunciation, regardless of whether the mark is written predominantly before or after or below. E.g. for the consonant k क् (the mark below there indicates no vowel yet): क ka (kuh) का kā (kaa) कि ki (kih) की kī (kee) के ke (kay) कै kai (keh) को ko (koh) कौ kau (kaw) कु ku (koo) कू kū (kooo) I'm not sure about the handwriting stroke order of कि, but digitally you write ki, not ik (because that would be इक - an independent i vowel followed by a ka - 'a' being implicit at the end).
- dhosek 1y agoThai, as a result of its legacy encoding has you write, e,g., โ + อ = โอ even though the vowel โ is pronounced after the consonant อ. And in cases where vowel markings surround the consonant, โ◌ะ, it’s entered as three separate glyphs in display order.