Re: [ilreq] When does the ABNF work for Tamil consonant clusters?

As far as I can tell, the ABNF works for Tamil in Tamil script when there is no pulli (U+0BCD TAMIL SIGN VIRAMA) in _sight_.  You can get a flavour of how Tamils feel about their script from TACE16 (a.k.a. TUNE).  See the invective at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_All_Character_Encoding.  The only conjuncts I am aware of are those involving <kṣ> க்ஷ <U+0B95, U+0BCD,  U+0BB7> and 'shri' ஸ்ரீ <U+0BB8, U+0BCD, U+0BB0, U+0BC0>.  Otherwise, U+0BCD terminates an orthographic syllable.

Tamil seems to be the good example of an abugida as a neosyllabary.

The ABNF, which doesn't even work for Sanskrit in the Devanagari, also fails massively for varga-distinguishing Sanskrit in Tamil script.  Subscript or superscript numbers are used to distinguish the 4 plosive vargas, for which there is mostly only a single letter in Tamil.  For examples of this scheme , one can look at http://sanskritdocuments.org/tamil/by-category/krishna.php.

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Received on Wednesday, 26 April 2017 22:48:29 UTC