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Tibetan (Unicode block)

Tibetan is a Unicode block containing characters for the Tibetan, Dzongkha, and other languages of China, Bhutan, Nepal, Mongolia, northern India, eastern Pakistan and Russia.

Block

Former Tibetan block

The Tibetan Unicode block is unique for having been allocated in version 1.0.0 with a virama-based encoding that was unable to distinguish visible srog med and conjunct consonant correctly.[note 1] This encoding was removed from the Unicode Standard in version 1.0.1 in the process of unifying with ISO 10646 for version 1.1,[3] then reintroduced as an explicit root/subjoined encoding, with a larger block size, in version 2.0. Moving or removing existing characters has been prohibited by the Unicode Stability Policy for all versions following Unicode 2.0, so the Tibetan characters encoded in Unicode 2.0 and all subsequent versions are immutable.

The range of the former Unicode 1.0.0 Tibetan block has been occupied by the Myanmar block since Unicode 3.0. In Microsoft Windows, collation data referring to the old Tibetan block was retained as late as Windows XP, and removed in Windows 2003.[4]

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Tibetan block:

Footnotes

  1. ^ In most Unicode Indic encodings, although one can force the system to display a visible halanta by using the zero-width non-joiner (ZWNJ) or force the use of a non‑conjunct joining form using the zero-width joiner (ZWJ), there is no method to force a conjunct consonant rendering, which is crucial when writing Tibetan. Some exceptions exist: for instance, Sinhala uses ZWJ to force a conjunct.

References

  1. ^ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  2. ^ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  3. ^ a b c "Unicode 1.0.1 Addendum" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. 1992-11-03. Retrieved 2016-07-09.
  4. ^ Kaplan, Michael (2007-08-28). "Every character has a story #29: U+1000^H^H^H^H0f40, (TIBETAN or MYANMAR LETTER KA, depending on when you ask)". Sorting it all out.