From: Ambarish Sridharanarayanan (unicode@ambarish.ksharanam.net)
Date: Thu Jun 07 2007 - 02:34:48 CDT
Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:
> On Jun 6, 2007, at 11:50 PM, Ambarish Sridharanarayanan wrote:
>
>> On 06 June 2007 at 23:36, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, the second underlined character is definitely jña
>>> (ज्ञ). I've never seen anything like the first, but my
>>> guess is that it is ṣṭrī (ष्ट्री) -- but it
>>> appears to have a virama underneath as well, which I don't
>>> understand.
>>
>> The virama indicates that the 091f is a half-consonant (the
>> inherent vowel having been suppressed). You don't see this often
>> because most Devanagari consonants have half-forms and when they
>> combine with the 0930, the resulting ligature has the half-form
>> with the "forward-slash". 091f is one of those consonants without a
>> half-form, so it needs an explicit virama.
>
> I'm aware of all this -- I would expect to see 091f (ṭa, ट) with
> virama in a context such as ष्ट्र्य (ṣṭrya). The
> thing that puzzles me, though, is why the ṣṭr ligature
> (ष्ट्र) has *both a virama and a vowel sign*. In this case,
> I wonder if the virama is superfluous.
The virama is for the 091f; the vowel sign for the 0930. The cluster is thus
ṣṭrī. Without the virama, it would be ṣṭarī.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jun 07 2007 - 02:36:34 CDT