Go romanize! Re: Counting Devanagari Aksharas

[Naena Guru via Unicode]

Quote from below:

The word indeed means 'danger' (Pali/Sanskrit _antarāya_).  The
pronunciation is /ʔontʰalaːi/; the Tai languages that use(d) the Tai
Tham script no longer have /r/.  The older sequence /tr/ normally
became /tʰ/ (except in Lao), but the spelling has not been updated - at
least, not amongst the more literate.  The script has a special symbol
for the short vowel /o/, which it shares with the Lao script.  This
symbol is used in writing that word.  Two ways I have seen it spelt,
each with two orthographic syllables, are ᩋᩫ᩠ᨶᨲᩕᩣ᩠ᨿ on-trAy (the second
syllable has two stacks) and ᩋᩫᨶ᩠ᨲᩕᩣ᩠ᨿ o-ntrAy.  I have also seen a
form closer to Pali, namely _antarAy_, written ᩋᨶ᩠ᨲᩁᩂ᩠ᨿ a-nta-rAy.
However, I have seen nothing that shows that I won't encounter
ᩋᩢᨶ᩠ᨲᩁᩣ᩠ᨿ a-nta-rAy with the first vowel written explicitly, or even
ᩋᩢ᩠ᨶᨲᩁᩣ᩠ᨿ an-ta-rAy. How does your scheme distinguish such alternatives?

Response:
Perhaps this word is derived from Sanskrit 'anþaraða'
(Search: antarada at http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/cgi-bin/tamil/recherche)

Sinhala:anþaraaðaayakayi, anþaraava, anþaraavayi, anþraava, anþraavayi Use this font to read the above Sinhala words: http://smartfonts.net/ttf/aruna.ttf


-=- svasþi siððham! -=-


On 4/25/2017 2:07 AM, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:

> On Mon, 24 Apr 2017 20:53:12 +0530
> Naena Guru via Unicode<unicode at unicode.org>  wrote:
>
>> Quote by Richard:
>> Unless this implies a spelling reform for many languages, I'd like to
>> see how this works for the Tai Tham script.  I'm not happy with the
>> Romanisation I use to work round hostile rendering engines.  (My
>> scheme is only documented in variable hack_ss02 in the last script
>> blocks ofhttp://wrdingam.co.uk/lanna/denderer_test.htm.)  For
>> example, there are several different ways of writing what one might
>> naively record as "ontarAy".
>>
>> MY RESPONSE:
>> Richard, I stuck to the two specifications (Unicode and Font) and
>> Sanskrit grammar. The akSara has two aspects, its sound (zabða,
>> phoneme) and its shape. (letter, ruupa). Reduce the writing system to
>> its consonants, vowels etc. (zabða) and assign SBCS letters/codes to
>> them (ruupa). SBCS provides the best technical facilities for any
>> language. (This is why now more than 130 languages romanize despite
>> Unicode). Use English letters for similar sounds in the native
>> speech. Now, treat all combinations as ligatures. For example, 'po'
>> sound in Indic has the p consonant with a sign ahead plus a sign
>> after.
> In many Indic scripts, yes.  In Devanagari, the vowel sign is normally
> a singly element classified as following the consonant.  In Thai, the
> vowel sign precedes the consonant.  Tai Tham uses both a two-part sign
> and a preceding sign.  The preceding sign is for Tai words and the
> two-part sign for Pali words, but loanwords from Pali into the Tai
> languages may retain the two part sign.
>
>> For the font, there is no difference between the way it makes
>> the combination 'ä', which has a sign above and the Indic having two
>> on either side.
> For OpenType, there is.  The first can be made by providing a
> simple table of where the diaeresis goes relative to the base
> characters, in this case the diaeresis.  The second is painfully
> complicated, for the 'p' may have other marks attached to it, so doing
> it be relative positioning is painfully complicated and error-prone.
> This job is given to the rendering engine, which may introduce its own
> problems.
>
> AAT and Graphite offer the font maker the ability to move the 'sign
> ahead' from after the 'p' to before it.
>
>> Recall that long ago, Unicode stopped defining fixed
>> ligatures and asked the font makers to define them in the PUA.
> While the first is true enough, I believe the second is false.  Not
> every glyph has to be mapped to by a single character.  I don't do that
> for contextual forms or ligatures in my font.
>
>> Spelling and speech:
>> There is indeed a confusion about writing and reading in Hindi, as I
>> have observed. Like in English and Tamil, Hindi tends to end words
>> with a consonant. So, there is this habit among the Hindi speakers to
>> drop the ending vowel, mostly 'a' from words that actually end with
>> it. For example, the famous name Jayantha (miserable mine too, haha!
>> = jayanþa as Romanized), is pronounced Jayanth by Hindi speakers. It
>> is a Sanskrit word. Sanskrit and languages like Sinhhala have vowel
>> ending and are traditionally spoken as such.
> This loss is also to be found in Further India.  Thai, Lao and Khmer
> now require that such a word-final vowel be written explicitly if it is
> still pronounced.
>
>> Looking at the word you gave, ontarAy, it looks to me like an
>> Anglicized form. If I am to make a guess, its ending is like in
>> ontarAyi. Is it said something like, own-the-raa-yi? (danger?) If I
>> am right, this is a good example of decline if a writing system owing
>> to bad, uncaring application of technology. We are in the Digital
>> Age, and we need not compromise any more. In fact, we can fix errors
>> and decadence introduced by past technologies.
> The word indeed means 'danger' (Pali/Sanskrit _antarāya_).  The
> pronunciation is /ʔontʰalaːi/; the Tai languages that use(d) the Tai
> Tham script no longer have /r/.  The older sequence /tr/ normally
> became /tʰ/ (except in Lao), but the spelling has not been updated - at
> least, not amongst the more literate.  The script has a special symbol
> for the short vowel /o/, which it shares with the Lao script.  This
> symbol is used in writing that word.  Two ways I have seen it spelt,
> each with two orthographic syllables, are ᩋᩫ᩠ᨶᨲᩕᩣ᩠ᨿ on-trAy (the second
> syllable has two stacks) and ᩋᩫᨶ᩠ᨲᩕᩣ᩠ᨿ o-ntrAy.  I have also seen a
> form closer to Pali, namely _antarAy_, written ᩋᨶ᩠ᨲᩁᩂ᩠ᨿ a-nta-rAy.
> However, I have seen nothing that shows that I won't encounter
> ᩋᩢᨶ᩠ᨲᩁᩣ᩠ᨿ a-nta-rAy with the first vowel written explicitly, or even
> ᩋᩢ᩠ᨶᨲᩁᩣ᩠ᨿ an-ta-rAy. How does your scheme distinguish such alternatives?
>
> Richard.
>

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