Re: Level of Unicode support required for various languages

On 24/10/2007, Kenneth Whistler <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> A. This question isn't really about *languages*, but about writing systems
> (or orthographies) used to write languages. As an example, take
> standard Mandarin Chinese. If written with the Han writing system
> (the Chinese ideographic characters), it basically requires no
> use of combining marks. If written with the Pinyin Latin orthography,
> there are precomposed characters for all the letters.

Nearly all. If you remember a couple of years back Hong Kong wanted
precomposed letters added for E/e-circumflex plus macron/caron, which
are pinyin alternatives for ēi and ěi, but that was a non-starter, so
even for something as simple as pinyin you would need to support
combining characters (<00CA 0304>, <00CA 030C>, <00EA 0304> and <00EA
030C>).

Andrew