[HarfBuzz] harfbuzz: Branch 'master' - 2 commits

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Martin,

What we are hearing from our expert in Myanmar is that a few combinations
like "GA+MEDIAL YA" are used in modern Burmese to transcribe foreign
sounds, and then if the vowel is killed, the ASAT should appear over the
MEDIAL YA instead of over the GA.

For example the word Taj Mahal is written that way: တာ့ဂျ်မဟာရ်. See
http://my.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%80%90%E1%80%AC%E1%80%B7%E1%80%82%E1%80%BB%E1%80%BA%E1%80%99%E1%80%9F%E1%80%AC%E1%80%9B%E1%80%BA
.

The open source Tharlon allows this differentiation too.

As for UTN #11 vs the Uniscribe/HarfBuzz model of Myanmar, there are so
many differences. I found and we fixed a few issues in HarfBuzz based on
the UTN, but there are still several incompatibilities. In the Unicode
Editorial Committee we tried to created an updated table for Unicode that
combines these for modern Burmese only, which will go into Unicode 7.0 (I
can send you a copy of the draft offline). I would love to sit with you and
Andrew Glass (who owns the Uniscribe model for Mynamar) and try to
reconcile all four (UTN #11, Unicode Core Spec, Uniscribe, and HarfBuzz.)



On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 5:19 PM, Martin Hosken <mhosken at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Behdad,
>
> >     The previous grammar for medial group was allowing an Asat after
> >     the medial group only if there was a medial Wa or Ha, but not if
> >     there was only a medial Ya.  This doesn't make sense to me and
> >     sounds reversed, as both medial Wa and Ha are below marks while
> >     Asat is an above mark.  An Asat can come before the medial group
> >     already (in fact, multiple ones can.  Why?!).  The medial Ya
> >     however is a spacing mark and according to Roozbeh it's valid
> >     to want an Asat on the medial Ya instead of the base, so it looks
> >     to me like we want to allow an Asat after the medial group if
> >     there *was* a Ya but not if there wasn't any.  Not wanting to
> >     produce dotted-circle where Windows is not, this commit changes
> >     the grammar to allow one Asat after the medial group no matter
> >     what comes in the group.
>
> Might be worth reading UTN#11 on this. If Roozbeh has documentary evidence
> of languages where the asat really does go over the medial-ya rather than
> the consonant, then I would love to see it. The reasoning behind having the
> asat before the medial is because asat marks reduplication in that context
> in Burmese. It makes no sense to have an asat on a medial since people
> don't want to kill a sequence. Try saying a word final kw, you might be
> able to wrap your tongue around it, but it doesn't fit any languages around
> here.
>
> The aim of UTN#11 is to come up with a consistent ordering of diacritics
> that balances the need for consistency with appropriateness of spelling.
> For the most part it's OK, if a little complex. But that was because of
> pressure to put linguistic purity over technical expediency.
>
> IOW, I think the change you have made is probably a wrong move :)
>
> Yours,
> Martin
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