Re: New Oriya characters?

From: Anthony P Stone (stone_catend@compuserve.com)
Date: Fri Sep 04 1998 - 15:23:56 EDT


In Michael Everson's message of 9/3/98 some of the Tuebingen material is
misinterpreted - partly my fault, as will appear. Apologies for that.

>Noteworthy are three characters not appearing in the UCS. A gif, crudely
>drawn by me, is attached.
>
>The first two appear in the regular alphabetical order:
>
>ORIYA LETTER YA (U+0B2F)
>ORIYA LETTER RA (U+0B30)
>ORIYA LETTER LA (U+0B32)
>ORIYA LETTER LLA (U+0B33)

A minor point: in fact the order was LLA, LA .

>ORIYA LETTER XA
>ORIYA LETTER VA

The photocopy I received had been annotated with a line in red ink drawn
from the first of these two characters to the letters " X v " in red ink
on the right hand side (the left hand part of the line is very faint).
This "X" is a sign drawing attention to the character (this convention is
used on other sheets from Tuebingen). The "v" is its transliteration,
omitting the inherent vowel. Hence ORIYA LETTER XA should be "ORIYA
LETTER VA" [Notation: my versions of these names will be in double
inverted commas, and Michael Everson's names without any inverted commas].

About this character a note from Tuebingen says, "Das Graphem ... 'v'
existiert, um wahrscheinlich die korrecte Aussprache von Sanskrit-Woerten
anzudeuten." I.e. it indicates the pronunciation /v/, since Oriya does
not have a separate letter for this but, like Bengali, writes ba. "ORIYA
LETTER VA" is ORIYA LETTER BA with a dot in the small circle.

The second character, ORIYA LETTER VA, causes just a little doubt, because
the basic source for its use is dated 1931: G. C. Praharaj,
Puur.n.nacandra O.riaa Bhaa.saako.sa, where it is used only to give the
phoneme /w/ in Urdu and English words. Hence I would call it "ORIYA
LETTER WA".

The doubt is because (a) in ISCII: 1991 it is transliterated va and
identified with the letter va in other Indian scripts, (b) it is connected
with va in some way in Daniels & Bright (see below; I have not seen this
myself). In reply, I would suggest that the phonemes /v/, /w/ are perhaps
conflated here, as in Indian pronunciation.

>The third of these is an ORIYA LETTER CA with a NUKTA. In the T=FCbingen
>document (in a section of the source book called "or.iaa lipi" 'Oriya
writing') it
>is presented at the bottom of the page, under the words (which I can't
quite
>make out) "acirilta barn.n.a" '??? colour',

It is "atirikta bar.n.na" = 'additional class' or 'additional letter(s)'.
The other "bar.n.na"s are vowels and consonants (including anusvara,
visarga, and candrabindu).

>together with ORIYA LETTER RRA (U+0B5C) and ORIYA LETTER RHA
>(U+0B5D)

Other photocopies from Tuebingen show ORIYA LETTER CA with NUKTA used to
write the Sanskrit word cintaama.ni and the name ciinaa, 'China'. Hence
it seems to indicate the Sanskritic pronunciation /c/. But what it
guards against is a mystery to me.

>B. P. Mahapatra shows ORIYA LETTER VA in table 35.3 in "Oriya Writing"
>in Daniels & Bright.

>The identification of /x/ and /v/ come from the letters x and v written on
the
>photocopy Baumann sent to Stone. The /v/ was confirmed in Daniels &
Bright.

These points have been discussed above.

Tony Stone

Dr Anthony P. Stone, Project Leader, ISO/TC46/SC2/WG12 Transliteration of
Indic scripts.
Email: stone_catend@compuserve.com Thinking aloud on
transliteration:
   http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/stone_catend/translit.htm



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