Letters for Indic transliteration

From: Andreas Prilop (nhtcapri@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de)
Date: Mon Jul 18 2005 - 10:45:02 CDT

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    The Unicode range "Latin Extended Additional" includes many letters
    marked for "Indic transliteration". None of these are really necessary
    because you can use combining marks such as U+0323 and U+0325.

    Since so many are precomposed, I suspect the intention was to include
    all necessary letters for Indic transliteration. However, four letters
    (= eight characters) with ring below are missing and two other letters
    (= four characters) do not exist in transliteration.

     Indic letters Transliteration

     090B 098B 0D0B R with ring below -- --
     090C 098C 0D0C L with ring below -- --
     0933 -- 0D33 L with dot below 1E36 1E37
     095C 09DC -- R with dot below 1E5A 1E5B
     0960 09E0 0D60 R with ring below and macron -- --
     0961 09E1 0D61 L with ring below and macron -- --
      -- -- -- L with dot below and macron 1E38 1E39
      -- -- -- R with dot below and macron 1E5C 1E5D

    The precomposed characters 1E38, 1E39, 1E5C, 1E5D suggest that
    the Unicode Consortium confused the letters "with dot below"
    (denoting retroflex/cerebral consonants) and "with ring below"
    (denoting vocalic R and L).

    References:

    - ALA-LC Romanization Tables. 1997 ed.
      Bengali; Hindi; Malayalam; Marathi; Sanskrit; Sinhalese
      ISBN 0-8444-0940-5
      http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html

    - ISO 15919:2001 "Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts
      into Latin characters"

    - Transliteration of Indic Scripts : How to use ISO 15919
      http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stone-catend/trind.htm

    - The World's Writing Systems. 1996. Sections 31...38
      ISBN 0-19-507993-0

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