L2/13-208


Response to L2/13-195 on Siddham
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Shriramana Sharma, jamadagni at gmail dot com, India
2013-Oct-30


In L2/13-195 Anshuman Pandey suggests that the Siddham glyphic variants, if they are considered to be semantically distinct in terms of esoteric significance, should be encoded in a separate block. I agree with Anshuman. 

However, I believe the following points should be kept in mind:

1) The suggested additional block seems to be useful for encoding not only such glyphic variants which are treated ideographically, but also certain ligatures etc which cannot (easily) be represented using the basic Siddham encoding. Given this, one may consider naming the block Siddham Supplement and not Siddham *Ideographic*. (My objection is to the inclusion of the word "ideographic" in the block name.)

2) In the case of the "headless" letters:

a) the sample gives only headless KA and KHA. Are we going to encode a full series of "headless" letters? Would it perhaps be better to just encode some "head remover" character or something? 

b) Further, the Siddham proposal L2/12-234R2 (p 9) gives the headless letter both with a virama and without a virama. The sample gives headless KA and KHA with the virama. What sequence will produce the headless form without the virama? IMO it would be sufficient to encode a "HEAD MARK REMOVER" and so CONSONANT + HEAD_MARK_REMOVER [+ VIRAMA] should be able to take care of all the needs.

I realize that the chart presented here is merely a mock-up suggestion but I'm just recording my observations for potential future use in an actual proposal from Anshuman or anyone else.