From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Dec 01 2003 - 01:12:59 EST
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org on behalf of Michael Everson
>>What I haven't seen is clear evidence that the wa-phallaa is
>>considered to be related to nominal BA and not a distinct character
>>falling after LA.
>
>WA has been added as a new independent letter, without a
>decomposition to O+BA, although its graphic appearance and simple
>phonetics shows us that it is an innovation based on that
>combination.
No, the graphic appearance and phonetics reassure is this is a plausible hypothesis; they don't show us this must be how it is.
> If DBA = [dwa] surely OBA = [owa] > [wa]
But there's that underlying assumption which is what I have been questioning: is the written representation of /dwa/ really D.BA, or should it be considered D.WA? I still haven't seen clear evidence; only an assertion of the former based on a hypothesis that, granted, is certainly plausible.
But the more important question is how users and implementers, particularly those in India, will expect these conjuncts to be encoded, and that question remains. If I implement one thing and others another, we've got a problem.
I was hoping there might be some Indian -- Oriyan -- implementers or users lurking that might want to comment. If not, then there's not much more to say on this topic here. I'll try elsewhere; in the meantime, I've got another similar question coming (encode based on sound or based on shapes?) involving some other conjuncts. I just need to get something scanned first.
Peter Constable
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Dec 01 2003 - 01:58:37 EST