Re: Unicode Tibetan (Was: syllable level encoding in unicode)

John Cowan wrote:

>Buginese doesn't even have a way of distinguishing final consonants;
>you just have to know which ones they are. It's also common in
>Hindi not to use a virama (vowel killer) on a final consonant; again,
>you just have to know which inherent vowels aren't pronounced.
>They're still abugidas.
>

Now I, coming at it as a Sanskrit student and not a Hindi student, heard
it more as "Hindi doesn't always pronounce the final -a; it's often
dropped." Which also at least has some degree of truth: many
consonant-final words (with no virama) in Hindi are Sanskrit borrowings
that do end in -a (e.g. the name Raam/Raama, etc).

~mark