Mark Davis wrote on the Unicode list:
>
> Why do you think that U+0B83 should be an L*?
>
> Antoine Leca wrote:
>
> > - this also remains me of the status of Tamil aytam U+0B83 "TAMIL SIGN
> > VISARGA", which is tagged "Mc", while it appears it may be a real letter
> > instead (but it cannot begin a word)
["Mc" means "combining mark", that is the classification of the visargas.]
Well, I defer to the Tamil experts (I hope there are some of them since that
Tamil Nadu have decided to participate to the Unicode consortium).
Anyway, here is my analysis:
Based on several sources (among these, Dr. Stone's pages at
<URL:http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/stone_catend/tr6.htm#ayt>,
while the references can be reached from
<URL:http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/stone_catend/trframed.htm>,
I understand that unification (in ISCII) of visarga with the Tamil symbol
named �ytam is not completely true, and should be taken with care.
Then, from some (written) conversations with Tamil speaking persons,
I got the impression that �ytam is viewed much like another letter,
and quite not as a modifier like the visarga is. For example, visarga
is never shown alone, but always follows a vowel, usually independent a.
OTOH, aaytam was spelled independently by Tamil speakers when I asked
them about the collating order.
But as I said before, this is much more personnal impression rather than
a definitive option, and I am sure Tamil people should be more trusted
than I am on this subject. For example, I have no idea of the way
Sanskrit visargas are written when the Grantha script is used (assuming
that the Grantha script should re-use the Tamil codepoints, which is
another debate).
Antoine
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