On 01/17/2001 06:05:15 AM Antoine Leca wrote:
>Of course, in regular Nagari, one ought to encode A +
>virama + La/0932 (+ virama if followed by a consonant or at end of the
word
>in Sanskrit), as this is the way it is written.
This is actually done? I got the impression from reading chapter 9 in TUS3
that in Devanagari virama occurs only after a consonant, which seems
reasonable if you consider that it doesn't make sense to kill an inherent
vowel on an independent vowel.
I'm trying to sort out what should be proposed for Syloti Nagri. There are
four consonants that can be conjoined to a preceding independent vowel.
From what I understand, these are mainly used for Arabic borrowings in
Islamic texts, but possibly also in English borrowings. So, for example,
Allah is written as al-la-h.
I hadn't noticed the vocalic L and LL in Devanagari and Bengali before.
These do give a precedent of consonantal sounds encoded as combining marks.
There is a difference from the Syloti case, though: in D and B, these are
distinct marks, discontiguous from the base character, whereas the marks in
the Syloti case are conjoined, being obligatorily attached to the vertical
stem of the base (independent vowel) character.
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
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