No one has ever written a Virama after a vowel, never ever. You will not find it in any printed matter, except in the Indic FAQ, and in articles discussing the FAQ.
*You will however find a Ya-phalaa after a vowel*.
Ya-phalaa can be found after a vowel, and after a consonant. It is a conjunct form of YA, and is produced by the sequence VIRAMA + YA.
> >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.
You are muddled here. Dr Mitra is talking about 'Virama'. You seem to be talking about Ya-phalaa.
No, I said what I meant. I will say it again. The virama when attached to a consonant kills the inherent vowel. It is also used to alter the glyph shape of the preceding consonant, or the following consonant, or both. In the case of TA + VIRAMA + YA, the YA takes the squiggly ya-phalaa form. Unusually, the VIRAMA + YA can follow an independent vowel, in which case there is no "vowel killing" per se, but in which the the YA takes the squiggly ya-phalaa form. Same behaviour, same encoding.
I must cut in here. I am concerned that you seem to think that Bengalis write 'pratyeka' as PA + VIRAMA + RA + TA + VIRAMA + YA + E + KA. It was not until the advent of ISCII and Unicode that anyone thought of japhalaa as being the same as VIRAMA + YA. Ask a Bengali teacher what the equivalent to 'Virama-Ya' is, and you will most likely get a blank or puzzled face.
Fine. So give them a single key on their input methods if they cannot abide typing VIRAMA + YA, so that when they press the key the sequence VIRAMA+YA is entered. Hide the encoding from them if you must. But don't ask us to change the encoding, which is historically accurate and works just fine.
> In Bengali, however, > it is not pronounced [pratje:ka] as it is in Sanskrit; it ispronounced [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 [�]; cf. byaakaran.a 'grammar', pronounced [b�kOron].
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 [b�] encouraged an extension of this, so that by applying it to an independent vowel an initial [�] could be pronounced in initial position. It is Bengalis who invented this practice, not us. We just encoded it.
This notion is wrong. Bengalis invented the placing of 'Yaphalaa' after 'A' not 'virama'. And you are proposing to encode it in an semantically incorrect way.
And Ya-phalaa is encoded as VIRAMA + YA.
Look, this is pretty simple. BYAA (BA + VIRAMA + YA + AA) is pronounced [b�]. AYAA (A + VIRAMA + YA + AA) is pronounced [�]. We encode both in the same way.
Viramas and vowels should mix in the Unicode encoding scheme. That is why we have Vowel Signs. E.g. The syllable 'KU' is a combination of 'Ka' and 'Full Vowel U'. It is encoded as 'Ka' + 'VowelSignU' is Unicode. It could also be said that 'KU' can be encoded as 'Ka'+'Virama'+'Full_Vowel_U' - but that is in line with the Unicode Indic encoding scheme.
This isn't the same. YA is a consonant, not a vowel sign, and it is affected by the preceding VIRAMA. As it happens, the special shape that consonant gets affects the pronunciation in a peculiar way (so that the sound [ja] isn't heard) but that is incidental.
(Incidentally that is also why the example in TUS3.0, Chapter 9, page
214, Figure 9-3 ("Conjunct Formations"), example (4) is also wrong as
previously discussed. That example 'conjunct' is correctly encoded as
Ra+'VowelSignVocalicR' in Unicode and not as shown.
Yes, we know that that figure is an error, and have verified it with Monier-Williams' Sanskrit dictionary, and it will be corrected.
> I am sure that Unicode and ISCII data can be exchanged with regard tothis matter.
Not very easily, the exchange of data will require a 'four-character ahead lookup'
One understands that this is not all that difficult. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
