Re: Tamil 0B83: Tamil Aytham and Devanagari VisargaL

From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 15:45:25 CST

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Tamil 0B83: Tamil Aytham and Devanagari VisargaL"

    Code Chart, the front page is not telling the truth.

    It calls Aytham as VisargaL.

    It is wrong. It is technically wrong. It does not do what Visarga migt do!
    It is not Visarga. It breaks Unicode implementations, because of it's untru
    descriptive name.
    It is an insult to a suffering minority language.

    Sinnathurai srivas

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Kenneth Whistler" <kenw@sybase.com>
    To: <jameskass@att.net>
    Cc: <unicode@unicode.org>; <kenw@sybase.com>
    Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 7:09 AM
    Subject: Re: Tamil 0B83: Tamil Aytham and Devanagari VisargaL

    >
    >> Since the character has been part of Unicode since version 1.0, it
    >> seems likely that the name was simply carried over from an
    >> earlier standard, perhaps the ISCII standard.
    >
    > Confirming what James has surmised, U+0B83 was named
    > TAMIL SIGN VISARGA in Unicode 1.0, based on the positional
    > assignment of this character to 0xA3 "Vowel-modifier VISARG"
    > in ISCII 1988.
    >
    > In Unicode 1.0 it was *correctly* shown as not being
    > a combining character.
    >
    > In Unicode 2.0, based on the chart in Annex - A, Indian
    > Script Alphabet Correspondence in IS 13194:1991 (ISCII 1991),
    > it was "corrected" -- incorrectly -- to being a combining
    > character in Unicode 2.0.
    >
    > And hence began the sorry tale of misimplementations, which
    > then later had to be corrected, when U+0B83 was identified
    > as aytham, a non-combining letter in Tamil.
    >
    > Now those mistakes have been identified. The data files
    > have long been corrected and the code charts are annotated
    > and show a proper glyph.
    >
    > --Ken
    >
    >
    >
    >



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