VS: Sinhala naming conventions

Why don't you translate the appropriate set of character names for local use? We have translated into Finnish the names of the 10646 collection defined as MES-2 (Multilingual European Subset - 2). Admittedly, we should do some maintenance on this.

Regards, Erkki I. Kolehmainen

-----Alkuperäinen viesti-----
Lähettäjä: unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org] Puolesta Shriramana Sharma
Lähetetty: 10. heinäkuuta 2012 6:14
Vastaanottaja: Harshula
Kopio: Michael Everson; unicode_at_unicode.org; Ruvan Weerasinghe
Aihe: Sinhala naming conventions

Changing the subject line.

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 7:19 AM, Harshula <harshula_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 0D9A ක sinhala letter ka
> = SINHALA LETTER ALPAPRAANA KAYANNA

Hi -- while I agree with Michael that it would be better to have had a uniform naming standard across all Indic scripts which are perhaps more globally and country-neutrally termed as Brahmic scripts (and Sinhala is certainly a Brahmic scripts) I think it is not totally inappropriate to use the native names since the main target audience is indeed the native users. Unicode is a global standard, and it would not be inappropriate to acquiesce to native users' perceptions in cosmetic matters such as user names (since these would not result in technical problems).

The South East Asian scripts despite being Brahmic are certainly not named after the Indic pattern. So why not Sinhala use its native conventions as well? The Indic naming pattern was largely a result of the GOI's desire to have a uniform naming across *Indic* (!= Brahmic, right now) scripts to facilitate production of cross-script pan-Indic software. if they had given the states free rein in naming stuff, we would have had quite confusing naming standards within Indic scripts itself I'm sure. Many Tamilians would probably like to see TAMIL LETTER LLLA named ZHA, but the ZHA of native Tamil perception would not correspond to the ZHA of Bengali (or Assamese or whatever) perception, resulting in confusion for software makers and hence unsatisfactory software and discontent all around!

One will certainly agree that there is (quite naturally) less interconnection of India and Sri Lanka than between the Indian states themselves. It is quite unlikely the GOI is going to invest money in producing Sinhala fonts/software. This being so, if the Sri Lankan Govt wished to have their native names in the global standard to facilitate ease of production of fonts/software in Sri Lanka, there is nothing inappropriate in their asking the global standard-makers to label their script the way they prefer it.

Whether the native names or the non-native names are used, either way, annotations or informative aliases would be needed.

BTW there is no point in spending much more time writing on this, since it is a done thing.

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Shriramana Sharma