From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2006 - 14:58:46 CST
At 13:35 -0500 2006-12-28, William J Poser wrote:
>Does anyone know what happened to the Sinhala
>numerals? It was proposed to encode them at
>U+0DE7 through U+0DFA, but they are omitted from
>Unicode 5.0, with a gap in the proposed range.
>They aren't in current use, but surely that
>isn't a reason for not encoding them.
This is weird. I had a dream about these two days ago.
Ernest Cline asked about these in February 2004.
I had proposed them in 1997.
http://www.evertype.com/standards/si/si.html
Sinhala experts (from Sri Lanka) said they did
not know them, and the evidence we had was
insifficient to warrant encoding them. I would be
delighted to give my dream form and propose to
encode them... but have never found more evidence
than one plate and the description at §130 in
Gunasekara 1891. He says:
"The Sinhalese had symbols of its own to present
the different numerals, which were in use until
the betinning of the present [19th] century.
Arabic figures are now univerally used. For the
benefit of the student the old symbols are given
in the plate opposite. (No. III)."
On that plate are unique symbols for 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 (looks
like a ligature of 60 and 10), 80, 90, 100, 1000.
So, that's what we've got. No change at present.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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