Tamil Brahmi Short Mid Vowels

[Andrew Glass via Unicode]

Thank you Richard and Shriramana for bringing up this interesting problem.

I agree we need to fix this. I don’t want to fix this with a font hack or change to USE cluster rules or properties. I think the right place to fix this is in the encoding. This might be either a new character for Tamil Brahmi Puḷḷi — as Shriramana has proposed (L2/12-226<http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12226-brahmi-two-tamil-char.pdf>) — or separate characters for Tamil Brahmi Short E and Tamil Brahmi Short O in independent and dependent forms (4 characters total). I’m inclined to think that a visible virama, Tamil Brahmi Puḷḷi, is the right approach.



Cheers,



Andrew



-----Original Message-----
From: Unicode <unicode-bounces at unicode.org> On Behalf Of Richard Wordingham via Unicode
Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2018 12:50 AM
To: unicode at unicode.org
Subject: Re: Tamil Brahmi Short Mid Vowels



On Sat, 21 Jul 2018 07:55:51 +0530

Shriramana Sharma via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org<mailto:unicode at unicode.org>> wrote:



> This is a unique problem because this is probably the only case where

> the same script produces conjuncts for one language and not for

> another.



There are and have been similar cases.  Reformed (a.k.a. 'typewriter') Malayalam v. traditional Malayalam comes immediately to mind.  Pre-5.0 Myanamar script was similar, with Pali stacking and Burmese mostly not, though that gives you the precedent of disunifying the invisible stacker and the vowel killer, which I've always considered a bad unification inherited from ISCII.  'Pure' Tai and Pali use stacking quite differently in the Tai Tham script, but some Tai languages use a lot of Pali-style spellings.



> I had asked for a separate Tamil Brahmi virama to be encoded which

> would obviate this problem but that was shot down. Maybe that case

> should be reopened?



Could be messy.  Are you saying that people are relying on fonts being free of conjuncts?  One could use a keyboard with a 'pulli' key that produced <U+11046 BRAHMI VIRAMA, U+200C ZWNJ> - I don't know if people do.



Richard.
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