Thank you Richard and Shriramana for bringing up this interesting problem. I agree we need to fix this. I don’t want to fix this with a font hack or change to USE cluster rules or properties. I think the right place to fix this is in the encoding. This might be either a new character for Tamil Brahmi Puḷḷi — as Shriramana has proposed (L2/12-226<http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12226-brahmi-two-tamil-char.pdf>) — or separate characters for Tamil Brahmi Short E and Tamil Brahmi Short O in independent and dependent forms (4 characters total). I’m inclined to think that a visible virama, Tamil Brahmi Puḷḷi, is the right approach.
Cheers, Andrew -----Original Message----- From: Unicode <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Richard Wordingham via Unicode Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2018 12:50 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Tamil Brahmi Short Mid Vowels On Sat, 21 Jul 2018 07:55:51 +0530 Shriramana Sharma via Unicode <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > This is a unique problem because this is probably the only case where > the same script produces conjuncts for one language and not for > another. There are and have been similar cases. Reformed (a.k.a. 'typewriter') Malayalam v. traditional Malayalam comes immediately to mind. Pre-5.0 Myanamar script was similar, with Pali stacking and Burmese mostly not, though that gives you the precedent of disunifying the invisible stacker and the vowel killer, which I've always considered a bad unification inherited from ISCII. 'Pure' Tai and Pali use stacking quite differently in the Tai Tham script, but some Tai languages use a lot of Pali-style spellings. > I had asked for a separate Tamil Brahmi virama to be encoded which > would obviate this problem but that was shot down. Maybe that case > should be reopened? Could be messy. Are you saying that people are relying on fonts being free of conjuncts? One could use a keyboard with a 'pulli' key that produced <U+11046 BRAHMI VIRAMA, U+200C ZWNJ> - I don't know if people do. Richard.
