Re: Virama

At 12:27 27.3.2000 -0800, Barry Garcia wrote:

[snip]
>(this is not odd, the Tagalog script uses
>a dot below to indicate o and u, and a dot above for e and i.
In Brahmi, and hence in Devanagari etc. _u_ is a curl below -- more exactly
DEV has what looks like a roman numeral 6 turned 90 degrees
counterclockwise for short _u_ and 90 degrees clockwise for long _u_.

[snip]
>Also, IIRC, the nasalizer means /N/ right? if so, that won't work beause
>ranaka has it's own glyph for that.
No, it means that the vowel of the syllable is nasalized, but in some
languages it is pronounced as a following /N/.  In Sanskrit it is sometimes
used for word-final _m_, since in Prakrit a Sanskrit final _m_ disappeared
leaving the preceding vowel nasalized; thus to Sanskrit _aham_ "I"
(pronoun) corresponds Prakrit _(a)ha~_.  It may also be used to indicate a
nasal homorganic with the following stop, so that e.g. _tantram_ is written
_ta~tra~_.  These two later uses are to be seen as a kind of shorthand.


/BP

"Doubt grows with knowledge" -Goethe