>Be thou not deceived by the glyph shapes. The etymology is O + BA =>WA, not NYA + BA.
(Or NYA + something else...) It would be just sooooo cool if you would provide references to accessible sources that present evidence and analysis to support that statement. :-)
Your linguistics training is not enough to see this? Initial [wa] is required, the script uses subscript BA to represent it, so subscript BA is suffixed to independent O to permit it. And that makes sense, while suggesting that NYA has anything to do with it makes no sense.
Regardless of the etymology of that thing, though, what matters is whether all of these should be encoded with BA, and I wouldn't find it hard to go along with that: I've got a couple of sources ("Oriya Self-Taught" and an Oriya booklet, "Caattassaalli Paattha") that show a nominal form underlying this conjunct that looks like BA.
That's the traditional orthography.
But there's some confusion thrown into the mix, though, by the fact that they list the shape twice in their "alphabet" (their ordered list of consonants), one being where you'd expect to find a wa;
Who lists, where?
and then there're sources like http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~deba/misc/vasa.shtml that have the dotted ba form (0B35) as the second of these letters of the "alphabet"; and then there's Mahapatra 1996 (in Bright & Daniels) and the various other sources I have, including recent learning books used for children, and the TDIL doc, that have the WA (U+0B71) in that second place in the "alphabet".
On the page you cite, the first and second alphabets given read:
a aa i ii u uu r e ai o au ka kha ga gha nga ca cha ja jha nya tta ttha dda ddha nna ta tha da dha na pa pha BA bha ma ya ra lla WA sha ssa sa ha anusvara visarga candrabindu yya la ksha
a aa i ii u uu r rr ll e ai o au (missing short vocalic l) ka kha ga gha nga ca cha ja jha nya tta ttha dda ddha nna ta tha da dha na pa pha BA bha ma ya ra lla VA sha ssa sa ha anusvara visarga candrabindu ksha rra rha yya la
Compare these to the chart in N2525
a aa i ii u uu r rr l e ai o au (missing long vocalic ll) ka kha ga gha nga ca cha ja jha nya tta ttha dda ddha nna ta tha da dha na pa pha BA bha ma ya ra lla la VA WA yya sa sha ssa ha ksha anusvara visarga candrabindu ??a rra rha
Hm. I don't know what the first character in the last row is. It appears to be a nuktated CA. It is not in Unicode.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
