Re: Tamil 0B83: Tamil Aytham and Devanagari VisargaL

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 00:09:05 CST

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    > Since the character has been part of Unicode since version 1.0, it
    > seems likely that the name was simply carried over from an
    > earlier standard, perhaps the ISCII standard.

    Confirming what James has surmised, U+0B83 was named
    TAMIL SIGN VISARGA in Unicode 1.0, based on the positional
    assignment of this character to 0xA3 "Vowel-modifier VISARG"
    in ISCII 1988.

    In Unicode 1.0 it was *correctly* shown as not being
    a combining character.

    In Unicode 2.0, based on the chart in Annex - A, Indian
    Script Alphabet Correspondence in IS 13194:1991 (ISCII 1991),
    it was "corrected" -- incorrectly -- to being a combining
    character in Unicode 2.0.

    And hence began the sorry tale of misimplementations, which
    then later had to be corrected, when U+0B83 was identified
    as aytham, a non-combining letter in Tamil.

    Now those mistakes have been identified. The data files
    have long been corrected and the code charts are annotated
    and show a proper glyph.

    --Ken



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