Hello,
On Wed, 27 May 1998, John Clews wrote:
> What is actually wrong with the UTC and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 actually
> proposing to add a separate character for "eyelash ra"? Could
> somebody explain why that is not a satisfactory solution?
An addition of a separate character for eyelash ra is not a solution
according to us-
1. It is niether a distinct consonant or a vowel by itself in the Marathi
"alphabet". But marathi has some words where spellings are taught to be
used with the eyelash-ra. Since Marathi uses normal ra also, and there
are words which sound the same but are spelt differently in the two forms
(eyelash-ra and reph), having different meanings, it was found acceptable
to treat it as RRA. This served the purpose of spelling, display,
sorting, phonetic correctness and usage. HEnce eyelash-ra was
implemented in ISCII as RRA-halant as per the chart.
2. It will cause difficulty in default sort order, if it is placed at the
end of current assignments.
3. It will merely treat it as a glyph variant for the Marathi script in the
chart whereas ISCII/Unicode are meant to address the alphabet/character
encoding mechanism. It will contradict the basic phonetic approach used
for the design of character coding. This way a lot of alternate display
forms or glyphs or conjuncts may need to be added in future and the code
chart may only look like patchwork.
4. If you are thinking of adding a character for it, then what is wrong in
using the RRA U0931 which is already fitting neatly from all considerations.
(Refer to my previous mails today demonstrating its usage and
implementation in ISCII). It is not essential to treat all scripts of Unicode
identically for rendition. Although DV(09XX) in Unicode provides symbols
for transcribing tamil and other scripts, it is not a primary
consideration when Devanagari has a seperate code space in Unicode.
Priority must be given to Marathi and Hindi instead of the objective of
transcription. Perfect transcription from other languages can still be
achieved by other external software if need be.
Regds
Anupam
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anupam Saurabh Email: anupam@cdac.ernet.in
Group Co-ordinator GIST R&D, C-DAC Phone: +91-212-370034, 352461
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing URL : http://www.cdac.org.in
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