Re: Grantha

At 15:46 -0800 7.1.2000, Barry Garcia wrote:
>Well, i went back over that page I had that showed the Grantha script, and
>lo and behold, there IS a glyph for 'ng' (or a palatal n at least). Good
>lord....now i'll have to change the script a bit. *sigh* the joys of
>deriving alphabets that don't have transliteration in Latin letters :).
I just went to look at the page, and the "ng" char is surely there in all
its glory, identical to the tamil char and all!  I conclude that uyou must
have misunderstood something -- probably the conventional romanization,
where the "ng" sound is rendered as "n" with a dot above (or sometimes as
"n" with a macron above).  Perhaps you have had problems with the
by-way-of-Devanagari "decryption" procedure.  The chars on the graphic go
like this in traditional transliteration:

[Key: {:} = macron above, {*} = ring below, {;} = dot above, {~} = tilde
above, {.} = dot below, {,} = acute above -- all placed BEFORE the relevant
letter!]

a  :a  i  :i  u  :u  *r  e  ai  o  au  a;m/a.m  a.h

ka  kha  ga  gha  ;na               ca  cha  ja  jha  ~na

.ta  .tha  .da  .dha  .na           ta  tha  da  dha  na

pa  pha  ba  bha  ma

ya  ra  la  va  ,sa  .sa  sa  ha  .la  k.sa  j~na


(NB: the Devanagari {h} is misspelled as {j} in the graphic!)

I was mistaken about the shape of the Grantha anusv:ara {.m}: As can be
plainly seen from the graphic it has the shape of a ring placed AFTER the
syllable.  The ring above is of course the vir:ama, just as in Tamil (where
it is called "pulli"). <slap myself on head!>



/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto: bpj@...> <mailto: melroch@...>
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