South Asia Subcommittee Report

February 2, 2009

1 Bengali

Recommendation: wait for the next UTC meeting to discuss this.

2 Kashmiri

Recommendation:

• wait for further input from the Government of India
• ask the Government of India to submit L2/09-012 to WG2

3 Malayalam

3.1 Malayalam Dot Reph

There is a general consensus that a DOT REPH character should be encoded. It seems that the comments of the Govt. Of India are the result of a misunderstanding, and that the concerns with regards to the keyboard layout can be accomodated in a sufficiently adequate manner (noting that this is a rare character).

Recommendation: create a formal proposal for the encoding of a DOT REPH character, to be acted on the May UTC meeting. This proposal should concentrate on justifying the need for the encoding of a separate character, explaining the similarity with <RA, VIRAMA>, and discussing the keyboard layout concerns.

3.2 Malayalam Chandrakkala

Recommendation:

• all occurrences of the chandrakkala sign are represented using U+0D4D MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA, including when used for samvruthokaram
• if a chandrakkala is used in conjunction with a vowel sign, (e.g. U+0D41 MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN U), then the vowel sign comes first in the representation: <..., U+0D41, U+0D4D>
• the Malayalam base characters (including vowel letters), digits, dash, dotted circle and no-break space are appropriate bases for VIRAMA.

3.3 Malayalam Sorting

Recommendation: change the DUCET in the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) so that it accomodates the needs of the Malayalam language with as little tailoring as possible.

4 Vedic

4.1 Annotation of U+0FD5

4.2 Encoding of Vedic

Recommendation:

• add a separate annotation “used for insertion of characters” to U+A8FA.
• change the name of U+1CD4 to VEDIC SIGN MID-CHARACTER SVARITA

5 Brahmi

L2/08-277R was already approved at the August UTC meeting and is in PDAM 7. No modifications are requested at this point.

6 Kaithi

Recommendation:

• add the two characters proposed in L2/09-070; submit a specific proposal to WG2
• submit a revised 08-071 to WG2, with the following changes:
  • §2: mention the two characters of L2/09-070
  • §4: rephrase along the lines of “the usual mechanism for hyphenation in Indic script apply to Kaithi”
  • §5: the most common method to indicate an abbreviation is to use a circle-like shape, encoded as U+110BB KAITHI ABBREVIATION SIGN; other scribal traditions are considered to be idiosyncratic and out of scope for encoding
  • §6: use the two already proposed characters 110BC and 110BD.