Peter Constable wrote:
> On 03/07/2002 02:16:10 PM "James E. Agenbroad" wrote:
>
> >A similar but not the same situation is found in the fourth
> example in
> >figure 9-3 of Unicode 3.0 (page 214) where an intedpendent
> vowel has the
> >"reph" (an abridged form of a the consonant 'ra') above it. Unicode
> wants
> >this encoded as consonant + halant + independent vowel. I
> believe it is
> >better considered as a consonant + vowel sign combination
> which happens
> to
> >have an odd display and at least one Sanskrit textbook agrees.
>
> I may be wrong, but I believe that example has < ra, halant, ra,
> independent i >. The first ra is the one that transforms
> into the reph.
You are wrong, in fact, sorry. Although figure 9-3 does not show code point
values, both the glyphs and the abbreviated letter names make it clear that
the sequence is:
U+0930 (DEVANAGARI LETTER RA)
U+094D (DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA)
U+090B (DEVANAGARI LETTER VOCALIC R)
James' idea is that the same graphemes could have been better represented
with sequence:
U+0930 (DEVANAGARI LETTER RA)
U+0943 (DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC R)
It is an interesting idea, because <ra> never occurs with matra <r.>, so
there is no danger of confusion. But it is probably too late for changing
it: it would break compatibility with ISCII and existing Unicode fonts.
_ Marco
