Andreas Johansson wrote:
>a vowel killer (isn't there a less
> murderous-sounding Sanskrit-derived term for that, BTW?),
_virama_ (compliments of Perry's Sanskrit Primer); it seems to mean 'rest'.
The others are anusvara (final nasal) and anugraha (final h).
> I've, BTW, always been somewhat mystified that someone ever came on the
idea
> of having graphemic zero indicate /a/ (or /O/ and so on depending on
language)
> rather than phonemic zero.
Perhaps from the necessity to give pronounceable names to the symbols? (And
most likely using the most frequent V in the language? In Engl. we can, for
ex., refer to "p" as [p_h@] rather than [pi:].)