From: Anirban Mitra (mitra_anirban@yahoo.co.in)
Date: Sat Mar 01 2003 - 02:17:08 EST
It is difficult for non-indic thinking person to understand the
absurdity of the concept of virama sitting after a vowel. The
virama is meant to strip a consonant of its inherent vowel "a". As
a side effect of this it combines two consonants when it sits
between then. It is not an exclusive combining mark so that it can
combine a vowel (how can you strip a vowel of its inherent
vowel?)and a consonsnt as unicode FAQ asks its to be.
As per history of the letter A_YAPAHALAA_AA, there is no mention of
this composite in original "Varna Parichay- Part 2" by Iswarchandra
Vidyasagar, -unanimously considered by bengalies the original
alphabet of modern Bengali. This was probably added later to
tranliterrate words like Academic from English. It should not be
coded as a_virama-aakaar as for reasons mentioned above. Even ileap
- the iscii word processor considered it to be a separate moderen
vowel and placed it corrosponding to the chandra_a in Devanagari.
=====
Dr Anirban Mitra
Email: mitra_anirban@yahoo.co.in
Web Page http://www.geocities.com/mitra_anirban
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