New Oriya characters?

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Thu Sep 03 1998 - 17:50:57 EDT


Dr Anthony Stone, editor of the ISO/IEC TC46/SC2 standard on
transliteration of Devanagari, has sent me a copy of a page sent to him by
Dr Georg Baumann of the Universit=E4tsbibliothek T=FCbingen.

It lists the Oriya alphabet. Noteworthy are three characters not appearing
in the UCS. A gif, crudely drawn by me, is attached.

The first two appear in the regular alphabetical order:

ORIYA LETTER YA (U+0B2F)
ORIYA LETTER RA (U+0B30)
ORIYA LETTER LA (U+0B32)
ORIYA LETTER LLA (U+0B33)
ORIYA LETTER XA
ORIYA LETTER VA
ORIYA LETTER YYA (U+0B5F)
ORIYA LETTER SA (U+0B38)
ORIYA LETTER SHA (U+0B36)
ORIYA LETTER SSA (U+0B37)
ORIYA LETTER HA (U+0B39)
ORIYA LETTER KSSA (ka + virama + ssa)

The third of these is an ORIYA LETTER CA with a NUKTA. In the T=FCbingen
document (in a section of the source book called "or.iaa lipi" 'Oriya
writing') it is presented at the bottom of the page, under the words (which
I can't quite make out) "acirilta barn.n.a" '??? colour', together with
ORIYA LETTER RRA (U+0B5C) and ORIYA LETTER RHA (U+0B5D) (colour might mean
modifier, since the 3 characters have NUKTAs).

B. P. Mahapatra shows ORIYA LETTER VA in table 35.3 in "Oriya Writing" in
Daniels & Bright.

The identification of /x/ and /v/ come from the letters x and v written on
the photocopy Baumann sent to Stone. The /v/ was confirmed in Daniels &
Bright.

I honestly don't have time to do more for Oriya right now than this. It
does appear that there are three base characters missing from the UCS.



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