[mpeg-OTspec] MAL language system tag

[John Hudson]

On 13/06/14 5:31 AM, James Clark jjc at jclark.com [mpeg-OTspec] wrote:

> I believe this has the same incompatibility problems as the change to
> ZHH. The status quo is that there are two language system tags for
> Malayalam:
>
> Malayalam Traditional    MAL  mal
> Malayalam Reformed     MLR  mal
>
> These are clearly intended to correspond to the two different
> orthographies for writing Malayalam:
>
> - the traditional orthography
> - the reformed orthography introduced in 1981
>
> The existing meanings of MAL and MLR are both clear and useful. Changing
> the description of MAL to just "Malayalam" is an incompatible change,
> which removes the possibility of using the language system tag to
> distinguish between the two orthographies.

There has been some talk in Unicode circles of mechanisms to distinguish 
the orthographies at the encoding level. I'm not convinced, and I agree 
that it would be, at best, premature to remove the OTL language system 
distinction at this time.

JH



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