Re: Old Languages
| From: | Roger Mills <romilly@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, October 9, 2001, 22:35 |
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B.P.Jonsson wrote:
>At 04:13 2001-10-05 -0400, Amber Adams wrote:
>
>>I don't know why Devanagari gets such a bad reputation...
>
>Because when they write Sanskrit not all word boundaries are marked.
Yes. Final and initial consonants become ligatures; like short vowels
become long; a-i, a-u become e, o etc. Old Javanese writing follows the
same conventions. Eyestrain, mindstrain. (Laziness?) In some type-faces,
it's really hard to make out some of the characters, though that's probably
just a learner's problem. Indians seem to have devised little tricks....for
ex., (our Skt. course did not get into the script), an Indian student asked
"Is that written with '21 s'?" (that's either the retroflexed or palatal
one, which does indeed look like "21").
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