On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 11:43 +0600, Harsha Senanayake wrote:
>
>
>
> http://tdil.mit.gov.in/keyoverlay.htm
>
> "The Inscript overlay contains characters required for all the Indian
> scripts, as defined bv the ISCII character set. The Indian script alphabet
> has a logical structure, derived from the phonetic properties."
>
> "Due to the phonetic/alphabetic nature of the keyboard, a person who knows
> typing in one Indian script can type in any other Indian script. The
> logical structure allows ease in learning, while the frequency
> considerations allow speed in touch typing. The keyboard remains optimal
> both from touch-typing and sight-typing points of view, in all Indian
> scripts."
I've seen these keymaps before, but I had a closer look. To me they
don't appear to be fully phonetic w.r.t. QWERTY keymap. Looking at the
Devanagari keyamp, ka and kha are on the Latin 'k' key. However, ca and
cha don't appear to be on the Latin 'c' key.
It looks like it's not fully phonetic w.r.t QWERTY keymap. I guess it is
phonetic w.r.t to other Indic/inscript keymaps. The goal would have been
to be phonetic within the Indian languages.
However, for our needs, we need to be phonetic w.r.t the QWERTY keymap
and not the Indic/inscript keymaps.
This is the best I could come up with in terms of the Sinhala static
keymap which is phonetic w.r.t. QWERTY:
http://www.nongnu.org/sinhala/doc/keymaps/sinhala-keyboard_3.html
> http://tdil.mit.gov.in/isciichart.pdf
>
> also checkout the Unicode additions the indian government has proposed for
> devanagari, it has the reph sign (repaya) ! must check if it has been
> accepted in unicode v4. I mentioned this in one of my earlier mails as
> well. I am not sure if we need repaya (karma can be written with or without
> repaya, and both are accepted), but I have some tendency to believe
> rakaransaya should have deserved a code-point. What do you think?
As soon as you introduce a new codepoint for repaya and/or rakaaranshaya
you just break the phonetic nature of the encoding scheme. You then have
two possible phonetic code sequences for the same sound. Not a good
idea.
ZWJ does not contain any phonetic attributes, so it's 'safe' to be
included in phonetic code sequences.
> http://tdil.mit.gov.in/pchangeuni.htm --> now thats what you call
> government involvement :-)
Yep, I completely agree. It's even worse when the official unicode
website can't even get the charset to be set to UTF-8! :-)
cya,
#
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