Oriya WA

[Michael Everson]

At 23:47 +0000 2003-02-12, Andy White wrote:

Michael Everson wrote:

 > 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!

Not so. While in Bengali it is common practice to attach ya-phalaa to both consonants and independent vowels, in Oriya it is only common practice to attach ba-phalaa to consonants. Only in the rare case of WA was it attached (by whomever invented the glyph) to an independent vowel. A book I have on Oriya shows KA + VIRAMA + BA yielding <kwa>, JA + VIRAMA + BA yielding <jva>, DHA + VIRAMA + BA yielding <dhwa>, MA + VIRAMA + BA yielding <mba>, and RA + VIRAMA + BA yielding <rba> (with repha), and SHA + VIRAMA + BA yielding <shba>. In each of these a consonant cluster is formed where the vowel of the first consonant is killed and the second consonant takes one of three different sounds. Since WA is a consonant on its own, and since it is unusually attached to an independent vowel, it did not seem sensible to encode O + VIRAMA + BA which ought to yield <oba>, <owa>, or <ova>. The vowel killed is normally -a, and O doesn't contain one.

Ken Whistler pointed out that Oriya independent AA could have been decomposed to independent A + vowel sign A. We didn't do that, and WA is quite similar.

 > 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.

Neither does OBA. It's [wa] not [owa].

 > 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!

You missed something, perhaps. But do you know when and/or by whom the characters were introduced? Or are you just analyzing the glyph?

 > 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.

I said that Taylor 1883 gives an unusual shape, which is not BA with dot.

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.

Taylor 1883 is different.

 > 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.

It seems to me that historical VA was lost having merged with BA, and something new had to be introduced.

 > >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.

BENGALI LETTER A + VIRAMA + BENGALI LETTER YA represents this, and this can be mapped in transliteration to CANDRA A if necessary.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com