From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Apr 07 2005 - 12:25:24 CST
From: "Josef W. Segur" <jsegur@westelcom.com>
> On 6 Apr 2005 at 17:33, N. Ganesan wrote:
>
>> If the claim is correct, the glyph for Zero
>> need to be changed. That's all.
>
> All of the code charts say in the Fonts section: "The shapes of the
> reference glyphs used in these code charts are not prescriptive."
>
> There are two Malayalam fonts at
> <URL: http://www.supersoftweb.com/Unicode.htm >,
> "ThoolikaTraditionalUnicode" and "ThoolikaUnicode". The first has
> the open round o form of the glyph, the second is similar to the
> code chart.
>
> Other scripts have different fonts representing styles used in various
> times and places, why should Malayalam be any different?
The above comments and references to external documents already suggest that
Malayalam digits are needed only for historical numerals. But at that time,
there was no decimal positional system and no zero digit. So in fact the
encoded zero is probably an error (it should have been absent like for the
Tamil script). In that period however, the one half fraction was in use, and
I doubt that this fraction was used to represent zero, when the other
existing glyph for LETTER TTHA would have been more appropriate to represent
the new digit.
Then there may exist some documents in the transitional period, where the
zero digit was introduced, where some confusion was possible among writers,
some of them thinking that the historical one-half fraction figure could
have been used. This is in contradiction with the prescription of the
circle/oval form for the modern zero in the positional decimal system, and
using the one-half symbol does not help making the transition from the
historical non-positional system that also uses the one-half fraction.
So, the bug report seems to be right according to the references. And the
simplest way to solve this problem is to change the representative glyph to
the same form as LETTER TTHA. Then to make a proposal to add the other
missing fractions (including one-half) for historical texts. And may be add
a variant for MALAYALAM DIGIT ZERO so that it will adopt the one-half glyph
if such use is still needed for texts written in the transition period, when
the form for the digit zero was not universally adopted for the new
positional decimal system.
May be also a similar work could be done with Tamil...
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