From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 00:09:05 CST
> Since the character has been part of Unicode since version 1.0, it
> seems likely that the name was simply carried over from an
> earlier standard, perhaps the ISCII standard.
Confirming what James has surmised, U+0B83 was named
TAMIL SIGN VISARGA in Unicode 1.0, based on the positional
assignment of this character to 0xA3 "Vowel-modifier VISARG"
in ISCII 1988.
In Unicode 1.0 it was *correctly* shown as not being
a combining character.
In Unicode 2.0, based on the chart in Annex - A, Indian
Script Alphabet Correspondence in IS 13194:1991 (ISCII 1991),
it was "corrected" -- incorrectly -- to being a combining
character in Unicode 2.0.
And hence began the sorry tale of misimplementations, which
then later had to be corrected, when U+0B83 was identified
as aytham, a non-combining letter in Tamil.
Now those mistakes have been identified. The data files
have long been corrected and the code charts are annotated
and show a proper glyph.
--Ken
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