I was offered the following reply: > To my knowledge except in Tamil script vowel less consonants in > written form aren't considered as separate "akshara"s in native > terminology.
Word-finally they seem to be being treated as such. To be more precise, a final cluster of one or more consonants marked as having no vowel is - Sanskrit has a few word-final clusters. > However for text shaping purposes they will surely have > to be considered as separate orthographic syllables in Unicode > terminology since in word end position they can sometimes carry svara > markers. The complication comes word internally. My understanding is that phonetically syllable-final consonants in non-Indic words in non-Indic languages have a tendency not to be included in an akshara along with the start of the next syllable. However, that tendency is more evident in scripts other than Devanagari; Devanagari has developed in the context of Indic languages. Renderers' syllable-recognition algorithms will naturally treat word-final devowelled sequences as separate units, rather than associate them with the previous implicit or explict vowel. Burmese is a good example of what can happen with a non-Indic language; in native words, phonetic syllabic boundaries tend to be orthographic syllable boundaries. Text-shaping engines like Microsoft's Uniscribe are more complicated. For scripts with a virama, they seem to assume that the virama may be a combining operator, and wait for data from the font to decide how many clusters to form. One test is the insertion of white spaces in a word when it is stretched out. Of course, that test can only be applied where human decisions are involved - otherwise we are just looking at what dominant renderers are actually doing, rather than looking at what they ought to be doing. Richard.