Peter Jacobi noted: > but it would still hold, that: > U+0B95 U+0BC6 U+0BB3 and > U+0B95 U+0BCC > are indistinguishable in written Tamil.
This is a true ambiguity in the writing system. <U+0B95, U+0BC6, U+0BB3> ==> ke-l.a <U+0B95, U+0BCC> ==> kau Every analysis of Tamil that I see distinguishes the two letters, l.a versus -au, even though there is an overlap in glyph form, so it is clear that encoding them distinctly makes sense, even though they participate in the visual ambiguity cited above. However, there is another graphological reason for the distinction. The -au character is a dependent vowel. You can't add other vowels such as -ii (U+0BC0) or -u (U+0BC1) to the rightmost glyph part of -au (the one that *looks* like the l.a consonant). But you *can* add -ii or -u to U+0BB3 l.a, so there is a clear difference in distribution and interaction with other characters. Finally, for ISCII interoperability, there was no choice but separate encoding (not of the length mark per se, of course, but of -au versus l.a). --Ken
