At 03:59 AM 5/20/02, Apurva Joshi wrote:
>I don't consider myself an expert on Indic scripts, but here is what I
>know related to the half vs halant forms being discussed.
>
>ISCII expects an 'Explicit Halant' to be used to display the halant
>forms of consonants. Sample sequence that is expected to display the
>first consonant in its halant form:
>Ka Halant Halant Ta -> KaHalant Ta
Is that same for Unicode, i.e.,
Ta + Halant + Halant -> Khanda Ta
and how Uniscribe handle this case? In other words, how can I write Khanda
Ta in Unicode?
>While to retain the half form of a consonant, a 'Soft Halant' is
>expected, thus:
>Ka Halant Nukta Ta -> KaHalf Ta
>
>Somnath Kundu-ji,
>Would you please give an example in Bangla (a conjunct, or a word that
>contains this conjunct) where the 'half' form of Ta is used, and how
>this half form is expected to be displayed?
>I believe Bangla does not have distinct half forms (as in
>Devanagari/Gujarati); and that halant forms are hence also considered
>half forms. The khanda Ta is used in both cases as shown by words like:
>mahotsav (where the khanda Ta is used as half form), vidyut (where the
>khanda Ta is used as a halant form) etc.
>Also, Bangla is known to have continued its use of the traditionally
>rich conjunct ligatures it shapes into. So the use of such halant forms
>(as half forms) is limited to displaying conjuncts that are not natively
>used by the Bangla language.
Yes, you are right Bangla does not have distinct half forms. What I wanted
to say is that I should be able to write Khanda Ta, Ta Halant (normally not
used in Bangla words), and Ta in a conjunct in Unicode text.
The reason for my posting was that I found Code2000 font some days ago and
installed Bangla keyboard driver manually, found on my MSDN Win2k CD, on
2k/XP to type some Bangla letters but was not able to type Khanda Ta. (The
glyph is also probably missing in that font).
It is still not clear to me why Khanda Ta was not included in Unicode as an
additional consonant, like RRA, RHA, and YYA, as it is written as a
distinct consonant (out of total 40 consonants) in Banagla script?
Thanks in advance for your reply,
Regards,
Somnath Kundu
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