From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Thu Nov 21 2002 - 08:15:27 EST
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_ Marco
-----Original Message-----
Message: 15
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 06:10:16 -0000
From: "Anirban Mitra" <mitra_anirban@yahoo.co.in>
Subject: Re: Errors in the Indic FAQ
All these problems of A-Jophola-Aakaar and Ra-Japhalaa-Aakaar could
have been avoided had Unicode Consortium agreed to code A-Jophola-
Aakaar as a seperate letter corrosponding to candra-E in Devanagari
Japhalaa-Aakaar as its matra equivalent. They are used for identical
sounds and Devanagari Chandra-E is always translitterated as Japhalaa-
Aakaar in Bengali. Although ISCII-91 did not code this letter, but
implementers of ISCII, lilke iLeap of C-DAC considered A-Japhalaa-
Aakaar as a separate Modern Bengali Vowel and placed it in Bengali
Insript Keyboard corrosponding to the position of Candra-E of
Devanagari. E-Japhalaa-Aakaar is merely an typographical alternate
form soetimes used interchangably.
Regarding considering Khandata, I would like to inform that
in ISCII compatible programs (like Apex Language Processor or iLeap)
it is considered as explicit halant form of ta, which is equivalent
of ta-hasanta-zwnj in Unicode. As Unicode claims to superset ISCII,
considering khandata as halant form of ta will be logical allowing
backward compatibility with ISCII. Moreover words like akassmaat
("suddenly") in which Khandata is used as the terminal letter
corrosponding to halant-ta in Devanagari shows its actual status. It
is very ridiculous to think that a word ends with a half form (which
the present Unicode recomendations make us believe). In rare cases
when we need to show ta-hasanta as a isolated form within a word we
can use Ta-Virama-zwj-zwnj combination. (see graphical illustration
at www.geocities.com/mitra_anirban/khandata.jpg )
Another problem area in ISCII-Unicode conversion in Bengali
(as well as Oriya) is Ya-nukta. ISCII-91 says Ya (U+092F) in
Devanagari is equivalent to Ontostho-A (YYA U+09DF) and Ya-nukta in
(U+095F) Devanagari is equivalent to Ontostho-Ja (coded as YA 09AF
in Unicode) in Begali. So while tranliterating Devnagari text to
Bengali through ISCII-91 (that is one of the stated purpose of the
code) the letters get interchanged causing improper rendering.
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