On Thu, 12 Sep 2013 18:30:47 +0200 Frédéric Grosshans <frederic.grossh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> However, this character 12399 is absent from the ballot, which stops > the additions in the cuneiform block at 12398. What is the rational > for omitting this character ? Stability with "legacy" encoding (i.e. > pre-unicode 7) ? I suspect the problem may simply be a lack of character stability. The problem is that sometimes the symbol for 20 was two characters <U+1230B CUNEIFORM SIGN U, U+1230B>, which could be mistaken for 610, and sometimes the two U's were clearly over struck, forming what I would call a ligature. I understand that there are some cases where what in some periods was clearly a sequence of characters was in other times clearly a single character. If we aren't going to have a character CUNEIFORM SIGN U U, I wish we could have a clear recommendation such as: "Use <U+1230B, U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER, U+1230B> for the 'digit' 20, and use <U+1230B, U+2009 THIN SPACE, U+1230B> for '610'." I've asked how the two should be distinguished, and got no useful answer - though Michael Everson's answer that CUNEIFORM SIGN U U would be encoded would have been useful if it had come to pass. <U, ZWJ, U> isn't perfect - one version of the proposal recommended treating cuneiform letters as ideographic so far as line-breaking was concerned. Perhaps then one would need something like <U, ZWJ, WJ, U> or <U, WJ, ZWJ, U> for '20'. Richard.
