L2/17-419 Subject: Feedback on Malayalam Vedic Anusvara Shriramana Sharma, samjnaa-at-gmail-dot-com, India 2017-Dec-05 I have reviewed the proposal L2/17-276 and find it to be well formed. I recommend the encoding of the character. However, I recommend that the codepoint be changed to 0D04 filling the hole near the start of the block rather than the proposed 0D50. The codepoint 0D50 is cognate with the OM characters of other scripts. As can be seen from my L2/13-062 which encoded a Grantha OM at 11350 from a rare attestation, it is quite conceivable that the closely related Malayalam script also has a rare use OM character hiding in manuscripts. OTOH 0D04 is parallel to the 0904 DEVANAGARI SHORT A which is a purely Devanagari invention. L2/17-098R ยง1.2 notes that this is in fact used to denote short /e/ in transliteration. There are no SHORT A characters in the parallel slots in the other major Indic scripts, nor are there likely to be since those scripts aren't used for widespread transliteration unlike Devanagari. Further, as the proposal itself notes, the Kannada cognate to the proposed character is also encoded at the start of the block 0C80. However, in Malayalam the parallel 0D00 holds the COMBINING ANUSVARA ABOVE so this is not available. Nevertheless, 0D04 enjoys sufficient proximity to the other nasality characters of Malayalam 0D00, 0D01 and 0D02. Thus I recommend to change the codepoint of the proposed character to 0D04. -o-