Michael Everson wrote: > At 02:27 +0000 2003-02-12, Andy White wrote: > >I said: > >? (I am talking about the letters mentioned in the Unicode Indic FAQ, > > > http://www.unicode.org/faq/indic.html#13) > > > >Just to be clear, I mean the letters called 'Vowel_A_zophola_AA' & > >'Vowel_E_zophola_AA' as mentioned in the above mentioned FAQ. > > These are A-VIRAMA-YA-AA and E-VIRAMA-Y-AA, which are sequences of an > independent vowel plus a subjoined consonant plus a dependent vowel. > Those sequences are used to represent foreign sounds in Bengali. > Since the ya-phalaa is a common glyph that can also follow consonants > it makes sense not to treat the use of it with independent vowels > differently.
Oriya Ba(Va), when subscript, is known as Ba-phalaa (bophola). When in this position it represents the original Va/Wa consonant. Since Ba-phalaa is a common glyph that can also follow consonants, using the above logic, you have reasoned that it should not have been included in the standard! > > Yes, Oriya O-VIRAMA-BA could be considered structurally similar, and > it could even be said that Devanagari K-VIRAMA-SSA which is thought > of as a letter in Marathi could considered similar. Not really; KSSA does not include a vowel. > In the case of > Oriya, however, there were two issues. (Did you read my paper, N2525?) Yes, I read it yesterday, but as I am already very familiar with the history of this character, I only skim read it, sorry! > The original consonant [va] was lost in Oriya, merging with [ba]. > Later, a need to represent the foreign sound [va] and the foreign > sound [wa] was perceived. Taylor 1883 showed a shape for this [va] > which is rather unusual, but in any case what came to be used was a > BA with a dot in or above its head. This was not unusual at all but common practise. In both Bengali and Oriya the letter Va looked identical to Ba, It is a common theme in Indic scripts for letters that have become ambiguous to be marked by a dot. > To represent [wa] the consonant > BA was, unusually subscripted to the initial vowel O. > > Two new, rare, foreign consonants were born. We chose to encode them. No, letter Va was always there - just that it was hard to see at times due to the lack of a dot. One new method of signifying the sound Wa was born. I have put up some samples of the Bengali version of the letter Wa here: http://www.exnet.btinternet.co.uk/uniprop/tsample.htm > >I must add here that Bengali also has a combination used to > transcribe > >Wa. It is LETTER O + YYA_PHALAA. > > Prove it, please. Bagchi suggests as much in Daniels & Bright but the > description is ambiguous. > > >Another is 'Bengali Letter Central A' used to transcribe English 'a' > >as in ball. (Comparable to Devanagri Chandra A). It is visibly a > >Bengali letter A with postfix letter Ya (Bengali Letter A with > >Ya-phalaa). I think that this letter, among with a few others not > >mentioned, should be included for compatibility with the Devanagri > >code block. But what do you think? > > I don't see how Bengali is incompatible with Devanagari. I never said it was, my point was that the Bengali block currently has no parallel letter to Chandra A. Andy
