On Wed, 18 Dec 2002 01:20:00 -0800 (PST), Michael Everson wrote: > These 950 syllables are insufficient to express anything but > newspaper and bureaucratic Tibetan.
To be fair to the Chinese, this is simply not true. Not only is this set (together with the basic letters already encoded at U+0F40 through U+0F69) sufficient for normal written Tibetan (and not all Tibetans are Buddhists monks - there are actually Tibetans who use the language for modern purposes such as journalism, science, literature, poetry, and even bureaucracy) as well as "literary" Tibetan (which orthographically is little different from modern written Tibetan), but it seems from a brief perusal to cover the vast majority of complex stacks and Sanskrit forms that are used for writing religious texts. The reason why this set of precomposed Tibetan stacks is so comprehensive is presumably due to the great number of Tibetan books, secular and religious, that have been published in China during recent years, and this set reflects the needs of these published books. Sure the works encoded using these precomposed forms is only a subset of the entire corpus of Tibetan literature, but it's probably a pretty representative subset. Nevertheless, the set does not cover everything, and if the proposal were to be accepted, the existing Tibetan character encoding model would still have to be used on occasion to encode rarely seen forms. This set is NOT an attempt by the Chinese government to restrict the Tibetan language or somehow stop the Tibetans from writing Buddhist texts. I believe it is a genuine but misguided attempt to simplify the encoding of Tibetan, and thus make Tibetan more accessible. The Chinese (and Tibetans) probably see the Unicode model as being more restrictive - certainly its top-down stack encoding goes contrary to Tibetan stack analysis for stacks with head letters, and is counter-intuitive to native speakers. Nevertheless the Unicode model does work, and we should be trying to convince the Chinese that this is so. Andrew
