RE: Two Final Threads - Diphthongs / Final glyph checks

Hi Badral,

I don’t see this as such a big issue. Fonts should be as neutral as possible and as Richard Wordingham put it, contain as little grammar as possible. Of course thorny solutions like the Final Feminine Ga in Mongolian are made easy with OpenType rulings.

The solution Baiti has implemented allows one to type in both AYI as well as AI given the preference of the user. Of course this makes more work for the utilities developer, but it maintains the emphasis on neutrality.

Greg

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Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2015 9:22 AM
Subject: RE: Two Final Threads - Diphthongs / Final glyph checks

Hi Badral and All,
Great! welcome to raise this issue and declare the insistance of linguists in Mongolia. because I know this the linguistic argument is continued several handrid years.
You can refer the Dr. Liang’s article what I have committed before.
I don’t care if you want to encode the diphthongs as AYI, EYI, IYI, OYI, UYI, OEYI, UEI. In this case, it is an irregular usage in modern Mongolian and
Unicode provide you encode the Y as <U+1836_Y, FVS1> in the Diphthongs.
We will continue to use AI, EI, II, OI, UI, OEI, UEI for Diphthongs. Because all of our users will definitely disagree for the removing Diphthongs from Mongolian scripts.

Here I am also collecting Mongolian and Computer Science expert’s opinion in Inner Mongolia.
I will commit all of the reply from Inner Mongolia in this thread till we can reach the agreement.

Please find attached file interview reply from 4 Computer Science Professors,
Song Yun, Has, Wang Serguleng, Lin Min in Inner Mongolia Normal University.
Let me summary all of the interview replies later.
Jirimutu
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Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2015 7:06 AM
Subject: Re: Two Final Threads - Diphthongs / Final glyph checks

Hi Greg,
Unfortunately, I have to re-open this issue. You are right that you were insecure with my agreement.
I asked today from our Mongolian linguistic team with some Mongolian script experts like Prof. Dr. Sh. Choimaa, Dr. Munkh-Uchral et.al. to confirm this agreement at Mongolian diphthongs. Due to Mongolian language law or what I don't know, somehow the discussion was very intensive, sceptical and concentrated. Nobody has accepted my agreement with ai, ei, oi, ue, üe, öe. I claimed that this encoding seems similar to Mongolian Cyrillic (ай, эй, ой, өй, үй, өй) and simplify our rules significantly. But they argue as follows:
Argument 1: It destabilizes existing Mongolian data. They summarized, that any changes could be only acceptable/doable for some good reason like bug fix, correction (at least like our Da, Na, Ga issues) but not for destruction!
Argument 2: Encoding diphthongs as ai, ei etc. lead damage to Mongolian script. As you all know Mongolian script keeps the alternation rule of consonant and vowel. And we treat ya as a consonant and keep the rule. But if we encode diphthongs as ai, ei etc., it voids the rule.
Argument 3: We should be more concentrated on how to encode Mongolian Script correctly in computer rather than damaging it to make the encoding easier.
Summary: All diphthongs have to be encoded as ayi, eyi, oyi, uyi, öyi, üyi.

Badral
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