Unfortunately, it isn't the only case in which symbol collections should
be rendered differently depending on the language with which they are
used. As I understand it, we have at least one more in the case of
Devanagari.
That's all. Isn't it?
Well, there's Greek/Coptic. I don't have the 10646 draft here, but
the Unicode standard says:
The Coptic script is regarded as a font/style variant of the
Greek alphabet.
OK. But Unicode is not 10646.
DIS 10646-1.2 says that it uses
ISO5428:1984
ISO8859/7
for Greek. Does anyone know how these ISOs says about Coptic?
The standard also seems to imply that Thai characters may be rendered
differently when writing Pali and Sanskrit than when writing Thai. (I
may be misreading it, and it is only claiming that Thai has
differences from other Indic scripts which are also used to write
these languages.)
Thai is not Indic scripts. Indic scripts are written with Devanagari,
while imported Indic words in Thai scripts are usually written with
Thai characters.
The situation is that Thai languages has imported many many words from
Pali and Sanskrit. The imported words are part of Thai language just as
Han characters in Japan are part of Japanses language. Unlike Han in
Japan, the imported words of Thai are written in genuine Thai characters.
I'd be unsurprised if some of the minority languages which use
extended Cyrillic alphabets didn't use systematic glyph variations
which were deemed "font" variations in the Cyrillic unification.
DIS 10646-1.2 says that it uses
ISO5427:1984
ISO8859/5
for Cyrillic. Does anyone know how these ISOs says about minority
languages?
Masataka Ohta