Tamil Brahmi Short Mid Vowels

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Sat, 21 Jul 2018 07:55:51 +0530
Shriramana Sharma via Unicode <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.