On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> Peter Constable wrote:
> > On 03/07/2002 02:16:10 PM "James E. Agenbroad" wrote:
> >
> > >A similar but not the same situation is found in the fourth
> > example in
> > >figure 9-3 of Unicode 3.0 (page 214) where an intedpendent
> > vowel has the
> > >"reph" (an abridged form of a the consonant 'ra') above it. Unicode
> > wants
> > >this encoded as consonant + halant + independent vowel. I
> > believe it is
> > >better considered as a consonant + vowel sign combination
> > which happens
> > to
> > >have an odd display and at least one Sanskrit textbook agrees.
> >
> > I may be wrong, but I believe that example has < ra, halant, ra,
> > independent i >. The first ra is the one that transforms
> > into the reph.
>
> You are wrong, in fact, sorry. Although figure 9-3 does not show code point
> values, both the glyphs and the abbreviated letter names make it clear that
> the sequence is:
>
> U+0930 (DEVANAGARI LETTER RA)
> U+094D (DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA)
> U+090B (DEVANAGARI LETTER VOCALIC R)
>
> James' idea is that the same graphemes could have been better represented
> with sequence:
>
> U+0930 (DEVANAGARI LETTER RA)
> U+0943 (DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC R)
>
> It is an interesting idea, because <ra> never occurs with matra <r.>, so
> there is no danger of confusion. But it is probably too late for changing
> it: it would break compatibility with ISCII and existing Unicode fonts.
>
> _ Marco
>
>
Monday, March 11, 2002
<ra> as reph does occur with <r.> cf. Monier Williams' Sanskrit-English
Dictionary, page 554, second column, between "niru_ha" and "nire>" (using
underscore for macron and > for circumflex are "nirr.i" and "nirr.ich" and
"nirr.ij". I believe ISCII is silent on this matter. If so, how can
compatibility with it be broken? If fonts have this glyph can't they
allow two encodings to invoke it? I do not advocate deletion or
deprecation of the encoding shown on page 214 of 3.0 for this glyph, I do
advocate saying somewhere in the Unicode Standard discussion of Devanagari
that there is another, more plausible and more Indian way to encode this
glyph.
Regards,
Jim Agenbroad ( jage@LOC.gov )
"It is not true that people stop pursuing their dreams because they
grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing their dreams." Adapted
from a letter by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The above are purely personal opinions, not necessarily the official
views of any government or any agency of any.
Addresses: Office: Phone: 202 707-9612; Fax: 202 707-0955; US
mail: I.T.S. Sys.Dev.Gp.4, Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE,
Washington, D.C. 20540-9334 U.S.A.
Home: Phone: 301 946-7326; US mail: Box 291, Garrett Park, MD 20896.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Mar 11 2002 - 09:35:16 EST