The way the various Indic scripts create ligatures and take contextual forms make each of them very unique by themselves. The only common thing they have is a set of common phonemes which are more or less near from each other, with large variations between regional dialects.
They have a common structure, which we follow in encoding.
The way each of these scripts were then used and created their own orthograph for distinct languages and they were adapted to allow writing one language in another with irregular orthographic rules is so important that simple 1-to-1 transliterations from one to the other are very poor. You can't simply transliterate without taking into account difference of phonetics between regions speaking variants of the same language.
Nonsense. Of course you can. KA is KA is KA is KA and BHA is BHA is BHA is BHA. The *reading rules* for pronouncing what's been written differ, but the transliteration is by and large one-to-one. Tamil of course is an exception, having lost some consonants.
Finally, not all Indian share the "same" subset of characters. It's just unfortunate that you think that because the ISCII standard tried to "unify" them in the same encoding model, but still with distinct charsets.
This doesn't make any sense to me at all.
Indic scripts have much less in common than Greek, Latin and Cyrillic.
That isn't true.
They are just using smaller sets of letters (at the price of an extremely elaborate system of contextual forms).
I don't know what you are talking about. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
