L2/19-017 Title: Comments on L2/18-346: Sequences for Unused Malayalam Letters Subject: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com) Date: 2019-01-07 These are some of the comments on Malayalam chillu sequences proposed for the unused and historic cases in Cibu Johnny et al.,'s document, L2/18-346. (1) Whether /ṉṯa/ is alveolar t or r is not clearly defined in Malayalam. It depends on the writer's choice to speak/pronounce them. Given the implicit nature in reading stacked or linear /ṉṯa/, they can be formed using joiners ZWJ or ZWNJ) also. Only Microsoft Malayalam fonts uses Virama as indicated in L2/18-346, but note that this is NOT used in all Malayalam fonts. For example, in Apple or Google or SMC usage. SMC Malayalam fonts are used as part of IT education. e-governance , various magazines, books use it for printing. Fonts are https://smc.org.in/fonts/. These fonts are bundled in Linux distributions. In Malayalam fonts, it is common to see this encoding. It is requested that this wide usage in Malayalam fonts needs to be documented in the Unicode Standard. (a): Henri - where you need explicit linear RRa form, Malayalam fonts use ൻ+റ => ൻറ . That is . (b) When nta as in Ente or Antony is needed, these fonts use ന് + റ -> ന്റ. I.e., . (2) The historic examples are from an era when European missionaries were trying to learn Malayalam script then evolving from western Grantha script. Those uses are outdated for centuries now in Malayalam script and no one uses them. For these unused glyphs, giving individual code point sequences in the Standard is quite unnecessary. Many are considered errors nowadays, and the modern Malayalam script encodes them differently. (3) In case anyone wants to create a font for these, they can be tackled at the font level. For example, instead of Virama in sequences in L2/18-346, joiners like ZWJ can be used by that person. N. Ganesan