Re: Why wasn't it possible to encode a coeng-like joiner for Tibetan?

From: Shriramana Sharma <samjnaa_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:55:55 +0530

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 1:21 PM, Christopher Fynn <chris.fynn_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> I've read that at one time Devanagri was often written more like
> Tibetan (many complex conjuncts stacked vertically) - and have seen
> manuscript examples of this.

Well I am a native user of Devanagari for Sanskrit, and even today we
use complex ligatures and conjoining forms, but vertical stacking is
not very strong in Devanagari (or even in other N Indian scripts)
unlike in South India. (Only a few consonants, esp. the "semivowels"
YA RA LA VA, go that way.

As for Devanagari for Hindi, Hindi (or AFAIK any of the other
languages that use Devanagari as the primary script) by nature does
not have most of the heavy (i.e. 3+-consonant clusters) that Sanskrit
does. So that would automatically eliminate most ligatures. To my
knowledge it is only the Sanskrit 2003 (http://sanskritweb.net) and
Siddhanta (http://svayambhava.org/) fonts that have the extended
Devanagari ligatures required for Sanskrit.

--
Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा
Received on Thu Apr 11 2013 - 21:29:36 CDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Thu Apr 11 2013 - 21:29:37 CDT