From: Shriramana Sharma [mailto:samjnaa_at_gmail.com]
>> Can you show my images of how this should display in other scripts--in
>> particular, in one of the southern scripts that favours "C2"
>> conjoining behaviours?
>Hello Peter (if it's OK to call you that),
Certainly.
> Please find attached some samples from my documents L2/09-372 and L2/10-392...
I hadn't noted L2/10-392; I'll take a closer look.
>I have covered Grantha, Telugu and Malayalam for C2-conjoining forms.
The interesting thing about candrabindu with C2-conjoining forms, when the conjoining form is positioned directly below the base, is that there's no visual distinction between <C, candrabindu, C-vattu> and <C, C-vattu, candrabindu>. And even if the conjoined form is positioned below-right or right, C1 is the base and so can be a natural target for positioning the candrabindu. That is, given a sequence < C1, virama, C2, candrabindu >, if C1 is the base one might expect the candrabindu to be anchored to it rather than C2.
As I look at the Devanagari examples with candrabindu on a three-consonant cluster, it looks as though the candrabindu is always on the middle consonant, and that suggests to me that the candrabindu is being applied to the entire cluster and not specifically the second consonant. Is that the case?
Assuming so, I'm reminded of the Masoretic note mark -- 05AF HEBREW MARK MASORA CIRCLE: it's a combining mark, and an author might put it after a middle-positioned consonant within a word to position the mark above that consonant, but in manual writing it's actually centered over the word, and so to represent and print text with the highest level of fidelity would really mean a representation that annotates a word as having that mark and then a rendering engine that draws the mark centered over the word.
Where I'm going is that I'm OK with enabling a rendering engine for Devanagari to display <C1, virama, candrabindu, C2> with the candrabindu over the half-form C1, and so give that a distinct presentation from <C1, virama, C2, candrabindu>. But in the C2-conjoining cases, it's seems to me that <C1, virama, candrabindu, C2> does not need to be supported with a distinct rendering from <C1, virama, C2, canddrabindu>.
I'm not an expert on Sanskrit or other S. Asian languages, so there may well be important details I'm not aware of.
Peter
Received on Sat Jun 25 2011 - 12:04:06 CDT
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