L2/05-232 Subject: Comments on Saurashtra Source: Michael Everson Date: August 11, 2005 Peri Bhaskararao made some comments to L2/03-231 (N2607) in his L2/03-277. It is worth reviewing some of this in order to progress Saurashtra discussion. Section B6b. Whether the online fonts contain all the glyphs is not significant; the current proposal document shows samples of the character set in print including alphabet charts. Peri's comments regarding the shape of VOCALIC L and VOCALIC LL have been taken into account in the new proposal. Section C2c. Contact with Mr Kubendiran was made by the co-author, Jeyakumar. I have tried to make further contact with other users via the Indian Member Body, but have yet to succeed. Nevertheless, I am confident that the character set in the proposal is sufficient to accurately represent the script as it is currently used. We have clarified the discussion of the UPAKSHARA character in the document. Section C4a. We have clarified the range of use, Section C5a. We have clarified the range of use. Section D. With regard to the older forms of the script, well, despite requests no further information has been provided. Nevertheless, the encoding model we chose supports complex consonant clustering (with the use of the virama) as well as the simpler modern practice (with the use of the virama made visible with ZWNJ). It is extremely unlikely that older Saurashtran material will show behaviour any more baroque in terms of conjunct behaviour than the virama model can already handle for the other Indic scripts. With regard to keeping to the Devanagari structure, we know that this is unnecessary. Certainly if additional characters are required, they can be added to the standard, either in the Saurashtra block or in a block for Saurashtran extensions. With regard to the question as to "who has defined the modern Saurashtran script", we do not know who, but we have examined a range of modern texts in the language, and our proposal allows for the unambiguous representation of those texts. With regard to the distribution of phonemes and graphemes in Saurashtra and the UPAKSHARA, it is our contention that the writing system is doing something quite different than what Peri's analysis suggests. This is also outlined in our proposal. The new proposal is N2969, L2/05-222. I am currently preparing a revision of this document to correct an error in the presentation of the UPAKSHARA material and to add some other clarifications. -- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com