From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Feb 11 2003 - 21:55:41 EST
Michael Everson will probably also answer, but yes, he
knows what you are talking about.
The problem here is in part the result of too easily
using the term "letter" here.
These things are really a Bengali orthographic solution
to the problem of representing vowel sounds (in borrowed
words) that are alien to the "slots" of the basic
phonology, and which don't have obvious representations
using the basic vowel letters of the system. As Michael
suggested, the solution makes use of an existing conjunct
form of ya, in combination with other vowel forms, and
then provides a reading for them.
In principle, at some point in the future, either the
phonology or the orthography or both could evolve to
the point where the entire constructs start to get handled
as basic orthographic units (or "letters") for Bengali,
but it isn't really the place of the Unicode Standard to
try to push that evolution, if there is a well-defined
way to represent the sequence using the characters
already in the standard.
In some respect, the problem is similar to arbitrary
orthographic adaptation that people using the English
alphabetic subset of the Latin script sometimes make
when attempting to represent sounds in other languages
that have no standard representation with English
spelling rules. An example which comes to mind is
using "kl'" to try to represent a lateral affricate,
for example. The fact that the lateral affricate might
be a phonological unit in the other language, and that
it might even have a unitary letter representation
(e.g., U+019A barred-l) in some other orthography, doesn't mean
that if people start to represent it "kl'" in the
"English alphabet" that we then have to turn around and
encode a "kl'" character in Unicode.
--Ken
> I said:
> ? (I am talking about the letters
> > mentioned in the Unicode Indic FAQ,
> > http://www.unicode.org/faq/indic.html#13)
>
> Just to be clear, I mean the letters called 'Vowel_A_zophola_AA' &
> 'Vowel_E_zophola_AA' as mentioned in the above mentioned FAQ.
>
> Andy
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