[Indic-computing-standards] Re: The linguistic properties of Malayalam "Chillaksharam"s?

[Cibu J. <ci...@ya...>]

 The Microsoft typography page
at[http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/indicot/other.htm]
seems to indicate that decision to use a "cillu" form
of a consonant is purely a display/rendering one.  It
ties the "cillu" consonants to the "regular"
consonants that are similar phonetically.

=====> This is not correct. See these words: 'kaNvan'
and 'maN_veeNa' [in Mozhi transliteration scheme:
http://varamozhi.sourceforge.net/quickref.html -
almost same as ITrans]. First one uses 'Na' and second
one uses 'chill~ Na'. There is no general rule to
decide whether to use 'chill~ Na' or 'Na' by looking
at the letters alone? So use of special characters
like zero width joiner is necessary to represent a
'chill~' letter.

 
  
 
   o Are there Malayalam words that are identical
except for the fact that one uses a "cillu" 'c' and
one uses the ``regular consonant'' associated with the
"cillu" 'c'?  Do these words have different meanings?

====> Assuming it is a general 'chill~', example is
again the above mentioned words.


====> These questions are transliteration questions.
Except for the font and rendering issues, the Unicode
Malayalam discussions invariably use to fall into
transliteration questions. This is not surprising,
because Unicode is in part a transliteration in
disguise - as in transliteration, it is trying to
seperate out the essential building blocks of
Malayalam text.

cheers,
cibu
http://varamozhi.sourceforge.net


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