Re: letters that "complete the rectangle" in Indic scripts

On Wed, 18 Sep 2013 04:38:05 +0200
Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> Don't know what you mean here really, but the Indic scripts work at a
> core syllabic C-V level, and in order to fit with real languages, it
> was effectively necessary to fill the holes by inventing the implicit
> concept of null consonnants that combine with vowels, even of these
> compound are not breakable in the common sense (so we have now
> combining vowels, and plain vowel "letters").

As far as I am aware, a proper 'null consonant' has only arisen when
it actually represents a glottal stop.

> ... vowels
> are gven second degree of importance (true for all Semitic abjads and
> Indic abugidas).

I'm not sure that that is true. In Thai, vowel marks placed before or
after the consonant are classified as letters in Unicode, and that is a
fair reflection of how they are treated in uncomputerised contexts.
Moreover, when writing is not cramped vertically, most of the vowels
above can be as big as the consonants. (Many Thai fonts constrain the
ink of one line to be below the ink of the previous line, and that
causes cramping.)

> 2013/9/18 Stephan Stiller <stephan.stiller_at_gmail.com>

> > I have been told that Devanagari contains letters (or a letter)
> > that were invented merely to complete the rectangular C-V table;
> > not sure to what extent they (or it) were used subsequently.
> >
> > Wiki
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Devanagari<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari>
> > tells me about the letter ॡ (signifying "ḹ", I assume this means a
> > syllabic long "l"). Are there other examples? What about other Indic
> > scripts?

There are some rare independent vowels added to the Khmer script for
independent vowels for non-Indian vowel marks. Strictly, they aren't
necessary as they can be written <U+17A2 KHMER LETTER QA, U+17B9 KHMER
VOWEL SIGN Y> and <U+17A2 KHMER LETTER QA, U+17BA KHMER VOWEL SIGN YY>,
but in the same way as the two vowel signs are traditionally regarded as
compound, they can be written in forms one might represent as <U+17A5
KHMER INDEPENDENT VOWEL QI, U+17C6 KHMER SIGN NIKAHIT> and <U+17A5,
U+17C9 KHMER SIGN MUUSIKATOAN>. There's also a clearly unencoded pair
of dependent and independent vowel sign corresponding to <U+0E42 THAI
CHARACTER SARA O>.

Finally, one might regard U+0E0E THAI CHARACTER DO CHADA as
unnecessary. Phonetically it is redundant, duplicating U+0E14 THAI
CHARACTER DO DEK, though very occasionally it does represent Pali or
Sanskrit TTA which could not be written using U+0E0F THAI CHARACTER TO
PATAK.

Richard.
Received on Thu Sep 19 2013 - 03:14:34 CDT