Romanized Singhala got great reception in Sri Lanka

Naena Guru naenaguru at gmail.com
Mon Mar 17 18:18:50 CDT 2014


Romanized to Unicode? Romanizing is inside Unicode. English and all Western
European languages also use Unicode.

Romanized Singhala resides in Latin 1 character set, that is between U+0020
to U+00FF.
Unicode Singhala resides in the range U+0D80 to U+0DFF

There is no difference between RS and those languages except the users live
in an island far away from those others. Is there some reason you want to
convert romanized Singhala to Unicode Singhala, a terrible specification
that is already corrupting the language? I spoke to serious users such as
journalists and teachers just few weeks back. It is unfortunate that you
guys are still hanging on to it. Why?

The proof-of-concept font I made has glyph substitutions. That is how it
can apply an orthography.

Unicode Singhala is completely a botched work. It has vowels each with two
codes, one for stand-alone and one for its sign. Each consonant is
considered as having the embedded (intrinsic!) vowel a. I is not a
consonant, people. Then it has two ligatures included as basic consonants
These do not have normalizing rules, 1 because they are NOT canonical forms
as there was no precedent digital form of Singhala for backward
compatibility 2 It was submitted after Unicode closed receiving
applications for normalizing canonical forms. How on earth can you make a
sorting method for it?

When you backspace it destroys multiple keystrokes. Search and replace is
not possible, at least the way do it with English. Typing is a nightmare.

There are special rules for making Unicode Singhala fonts. The keyboards
have keys to type pieces of letters not in the code block.

As you see, this is a terrible mess and cannot be straightened, granted few
people use it, and there'll be more. What other choice do they have except
Anglicizing?. In Singhala, they say, "balu valigee uµa purukee ðaalaa
hæðuvaþ nææ æðee ærennee" (බලු වලිගේ උණ පුරුකේ දාලා හැදුවත් නෑ ඇදේ ඇරෙන්නේ
<- I inserted all joiners, but can't guarantee if vowel signs would pop
out). It means you cannot straighten dog tail even if you put it in a
bamboo.piece. You cannot fix Unicode Singhala and sadly, it is bringing
down the language with it.


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:05 AM, William_J_G Overington <
wjgo_10009 at btinternet.com> wrote:

> > So, everyone, can the Romanized Singhala system be used with a QWERTY
> keyboard to produce Unicode-encoded text, thereby producing a good combined
> system?
>
> Could this be achieved if a text-processing software package were produced
> that could automatically perform a character string to character string
> substitution (namely Romanized Singhala character string to Unicode
> character string) that would be applied before any OpenType glyph to glyph
> substitution?
>
> The character string to character string substitution rules could be
> stored in a text file, such as a UTF-16 text file saved from WordPad, that
> format being what WordPad describes as a Unicode Text Document file type.
>
> Could this be achieved?
>
> If so, text entry could use an ordinary QWERTY keyboard and yet the
> resulting text would be stored using the appropriate Unicode characters for
> the script and the font would use Unicode mappings.
>
> William Overington
>
> 16 March 2014
>
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