From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 04 2006 - 21:17:49 CST
Mike Maxwell wrote:
>Just curious as an outsider (and entering this
>discussion with some trepidation), but: what
>difference would the names make? Americans
>call the '.' "period", British people (I think) call
>it a "full stop". But that would obviously not
>be a reason for encoding the symbol in
>different ways in American and British English.
Bengali daNDa and Devanagari daNDa and Tamil
daNDa are different symbols, not the same as
period/fullstop (.) of USA and UK. Take
a look at the pdf, samples of Bengali daNDas
in pp. 11-12 of the 27-page document:
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2879.pdf
danda with a left terminal at top and right terminal
at bottom, especially interesting is the double danda
the left one is much shorter - quite different from
Devaagari ones. Look at Tamil, Kaithi, Siddham, Oriya,
Kannada dandas - they too are different.
Hence the plea for disunification of Indian dandas.
Bengali is an East Indian script with more than
100+ million speakers - obviously the Oriya example
(link given earlier today by me) of east India
has relationship with these Bengali daris, much more
than Devanagari script. Bihar, Bengal, Orissa are more
Buddhist originally like Myanmar, Khmer, Thai, ...
The current character names in Unicode will confuse
lots of people looking at character names, since for scripts other
than Devanagarai they see "DEVANAGARI DANDA" in a non-Devanagari
context. Take a Bengali or Tamil or Kannada
text, convert to NCRs and the corresponding Unicode
character names. Many "Devanagari (single or double)
Danda" character names will come up.
If disunification is done in Unicode this confusion
in character names will go away. We will have
Bengali danda or Kannada danda or Tamil danda
or Kaithi danda as character names in a particular
language's text analysis. Besides in the code chart,
we can annotate with each language-specific character
names for dandas. For example, Bengali danda
annotation: "Bengali dari", Bengali double danda
"Bengali dui dari", etc., Tamil danda, perhaps,
"Tamil tharippu or niRkai" and Tamil double danda
"Tamil muzhuth tharippu" etc., as annotation.
These language-specific annotations cannot be
done if disunification isn't done.
More over, the inconsistency of having danda disunification
upon Brahmi-derived Greater Indian scripts (Tibetan, Thai, Khmer)
while insisting on danda unification in Indian scripts hurts
the development of individual Indian scripts in the long run.
N. Ganesan
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