Re: Virama (was: New and Improved Script....)

>From: John Cowan <jcowan@...>
>The virama is a diacritic which when attached to a consonant "kills"
>the vowel, so that the consonant letter "k" now represents simply /k/.
>Explicit viramas usually appear on a final consonant.  In the
>case of a consonant cluster, all but the last letter of the cluster
>typically appear in a "half-consonant" form, graphically reduced
>by omitting the stem.  This is equivalent to the use of a virama, and
>in ISCII (Indian character code) and Unicode, half-consonants are
>represented
>internally to the computer by using the regular consonant plus a virama
>code.
Oh, thought you were talking about the avagraha!  Anyway, the _virama_ is
also called the _hasanta_ in modern languages.  In Tamil, it's a dot (or
more formally, a downward tick or triangle) above the Ca glyph.

By the way, what the hell does the _avagraha_ do?

Danny
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com