L2/14-069 Evidence for considerable usage of the Malayalam anusvara above Shriramana Sharma, jamadagni-at-gmail-dot-com, India 2014-Feb-17 In message to UnicoRe list dated "Mon, 3 Feb 2014 10:23:14 -0800", Cibu Johny raised the concern whether the Malayalam anusvara above was in widespread usage or not: """Judging from couple of similar looking palm leaf writings, it is hard to make sure how widespread the usage was. Was it the fancy of one manuscript writer? The other manuscript linked in the cārudattam page does not use anusvara above: http://www.bhasa.indologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/mss/22848/61.html""" The message forwarded below gives a significant list of catalogue numbers of manuscripts containing the Malayalam Anusvara Above which the research scholar has kindly taken the pains to collate. The character is proposed for specialized academic usage for transcription into the modern Malayalam script of these manuscripts which the scholars consider as belonging to an older form of the Malayalam script. It should be encoded for that purpose. If Cibu as a native Malayali is unable to identify these writings as Malayalam, so would a user knowing only modern Grantha not be able to identify these as Grantha. At a sufficiently early epoch, Grantha and Malayalam are indistinguishable, as is only to be expected in the case of scripts that diverge with time. In this case, it is other factors such as the provenance of the writings that would decide the script identification when it comes to choosing a script identity for storage as digital text. These manuscripts are from Kerala, and the writing is indeed *more* similar to modern Malayalam than to modern Grantha. As such, scholars have identified this as part of the Malayalam script. Thus that is how this character should be identified and encoded. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Anna Aurelia Esposito Date: Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 4:18 PM Subject: Re: Malayalam Anusvara Above To: Shriramana Sharma Dear Shriramana, sorry for my late answer, but I had so much work these weeks! Today I checked our manuscripts concerning the anusvara above. We have only fotos of drama-manuscripts, mostly of those dramas which are attributed to Bhasa. About half of the manuscripts have the anusvara above: Calicut University: No. 793, 948, 3113 Lalchand Research Library (Lahore) D. A. V. College, Chandigarh: No. 3521, 3741, 3745 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London: No. 42203/b Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras: No. 3481 Sanskrit College Manuscript Library Tripunithura, Cochin: No. 828, 839 Oriental Manuscript Library, University of Kerala, Trivandrum: No. c2181, co2495, L758, 1017, 5150, 10753, 12356, 14045, 15407, 15477, 15729, 15850, 16042, 17056, 17622, 17872, 18516, 20569 Best wishes! Anna ********** Dr. Anna Aurelia Esposito Lehrstuhl fuer Indologie / Suedasienkunde Universitaet Wuerzburg Deutschland http://www.indologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/mitarbeiter/esposito