Tibetan is a
Unicode block
A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes ( code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ...
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
Virama ( ्) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either
# halanta, hasanta or explicit vir ...
-based encoding that was
unable to distinguish visible and
conjunct consonant
Conjunct consonants are a type of letters, used for example in Brahmi or Brahmi derived modern scripts such as Balinese, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, etc to write consonant clusters such as or . Although most of the time, letters are forme ...
correctly. This encoding was removed from the
Unicode Standard
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
in version 1.0.1 in the process of unifying with
ISO 10646 for version 1.1,
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
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...
,
collation data referring to the old Tibetan block was retained as late as
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...
, and removed in
Windows 2003
Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April ...
.
History
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Tibetan block:
Footnotes
References
A Chinese concern posted to the Unicode Consortium citing the conjunct character "སྐྤྵྴྍྐ" (EWTS s+k+p+Sh+sh+x+ka; IAST {{IAST, skpṣśxka), showing the complexity of encoding.(Devanagari encoding never allowed "
ᳵ" to be conjuncted, i.e. "स्क्प्ष्श्ᳵ्क"does not exist.)
Unicode blocks