From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Aug 26 2005 - 00:17:51 CDT
Cillaksharams should not be given
separate codepoints as they will be equivalent to
a consonant (with a separate Unicode code point)
plus the virama sign. Cillaksharams will be "pure"
consonants. Encoding just five consonants with virama
as cillus is quite unnecessary.
A parallel case is Tamil:
Even though all Tamil grammars, ancient and modern,
define Tamil consonants as without inherent /a/
and with puLLi (viraamam), in order to fit with the Indic model, Unicode has
defined 'uyirmey' Tamil abugidas as consonants with character names.
In Tamil, pure consonants are not given code points just
as cillus are missing in Malayalam.
The linguistic analysis in Section 3.0 of Chitrajakumar/Gangadharan's paper
makes it very clear that the forms with conjnuct letters or the ones
with cillu forms
are exact equivalents. The 'samvruthokaram' is the
'kuRRiyalukaram' in the ancient Tolkaappiaym Tamil grammar.
http://www.unicode.org/~rick/05210-malayalam.pdf
On the mention of alveolar and dental n in discussion
of words "pin_nilaavum" and "pinnilaavum":
Please note that there is no distinction between
alveolar and dental n in Malayalam script.
This fact can easily be verified by checking
Malayalam and Tamil codecharts.
Malayalam uses only one n, U+0D28 in the script.
The 'alveolar' n code point U+0D29 is unassigned for Malayalam.
It does not differentiate between dental and alveolar n's
in the script. But in Tamil script, both alveolar n (U+0BA9) and
dental n (U+0BA8) are present. Note that Malayalam U+0D28 glyph
is more closer to the corresponding Tamil U+0BA8 glyph (ie. dental n).
Given the fact that (1) Malayalam does not distinguish
between dental and alveolar n's orthographically
and (2) Section 3.0, Gangadharan/Chitarajakumar's paper
on the topic about the equivalence betwen cillaksharam
and conjunct forms in nma ( a parallel case: nn in pinnilaavum),
the current Unicode implementation with Joiners like ZWJ
to produce cillakSarams is quite adequate.
N. Ganesan
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