At 07:17 +0000 2003-03-01, Anirban Mitra wrote:
It is difficult for non-indic thinking person to understand the absurdity of the concept of virama sitting after a vowel.
That might be true, based on what you learned about writing in school. But the plain fact of the matter is that -- with regard to ya-phalaa -- this is exactly what you do.
The virama is meant to strip a consonant of its inherent vowel "a". As a side effect of this it combines two consonants when it sits between then. It is not an exclusive combining mark so that it can combine a vowel (how can you strip a vowel of its inherent vowel?)and a consonsnt as unicode FAQ asks its to be.
It may not strip an inherent vowel, but it does attach itself to an independent vowel.
As per history of the letter A_YAPAHALAA_AA, there is no mention of this composite in original "Varna Parichay- Part 2" by Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, -unanimously considered by bengalies the original alphabet of modern Bengali. This was probably added later to tranliterrate words like Academic from English.
This is not correct. For example, in Sanskrit and Bengali, we have the word pratyeka 'each, every'. This is derived from the Sanskrit root prati (expressing likeness or comparison) plus eka 'one'. In Sanskrit orthography i + e becomes ye and is so written. Now in Bengali this word also exists and in both languages what is written is PA + VIRAMA + RA + TA + VIRAMA + YA + E + KA. In Bengali, however, it is not pronounced [pratje:ka] as it is in Sanskrit; it is pronounced [prottek]. Nevertheless, the orthographic syllable is tya, and is so written. It is also the case that in initial syllables, when this ya is used, the sound formed is [ę]; cf. byaakaran.a 'grammar', pronounced [bękOron].
Although you may think it illogical, the fact of the matter is that at some stage in Bengali written history, noticing that byaa was pronounced [bę] encouraged an extension of this, so that by applying it to an independent vowel an initial [ę] could be pronounced in initial position. It is Bengalis who invented this practice, not us. We just encoded it.
This kind of innovation is not really all that unusual in Brahmic scripts. In the Cham script of Vietnam, for instance, vowel matras can be applied to both consonants and independent vowels. In Khmer, independent vowels can follow the coeng (virama) and be subscripted.
It should not be coded as a_virama-aakaar as for reasons mentioned above.
Your argument does not convince, and does not take the historic fact into account.
Even ileap - the iscii word processor considered it to be a separate moderen vowel and placed it corrosponding to the chandra_a in Devanagari.
I am sure that Unicode and ISCII data can be exchanged with regard to this matter.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
