Sinhala naming conventions

Changing the subject line.

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 7:19 AM, Harshula <harshula_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 0D9A ක sinhala letter ka
> = SINHALA LETTER ALPAPRAANA KAYANNA

Hi -- while I agree with Michael that it would be better to have had a
uniform naming standard across all Indic scripts which are perhaps
more globally and country-neutrally termed as Brahmic scripts (and
Sinhala is certainly a Brahmic scripts) I think it is not totally
inappropriate to use the native names since the main target audience
is indeed the native users. Unicode is a global standard, and it would
not be inappropriate to acquiesce to native users' perceptions in
cosmetic matters such as user names (since these would not result in
technical problems).

The South East Asian scripts despite being Brahmic are certainly not
named after the Indic pattern. So why not Sinhala use its native
conventions as well? The Indic naming pattern was largely a result of
the GOI's desire to have a uniform naming across *Indic* (!= Brahmic,
right now) scripts to facilitate production of cross-script pan-Indic
software. if they had given the states free rein in naming stuff, we
would have had quite confusing naming standards within Indic scripts
itself I'm sure. Many Tamilians would probably like to see TAMIL
LETTER LLLA named ZHA, but the ZHA of native Tamil perception would
not correspond to the ZHA of Bengali (or Assamese or whatever)
perception, resulting in confusion for software makers and hence
unsatisfactory software and discontent all around!

One will certainly agree that there is (quite naturally) less
interconnection of India and Sri Lanka than between the Indian states
themselves. It is quite unlikely the GOI is going to invest money in
producing Sinhala fonts/software. This being so, if the Sri Lankan
Govt wished to have their native names in the global standard to
facilitate ease of production of fonts/software in Sri Lanka, there is
nothing inappropriate in their asking the global standard-makers to
label their script the way they prefer it.

Whether the native names or the non-native names are used, either way,
annotations or informative aliases would be needed.

BTW there is no point in spending much more time writing on this,
since it is a done thing.

-- 
Shriramana Sharma