Re: Unicode and Abugida Saga (was: wikipedia)

[commenting on both Richard's and Suzanne's postings]

Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@...> wrote:
> >
> > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
> > <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

[the attribution of this question is lost in the mists of snippage]

> > > One thing that is troubling me is the division of Indic scripts.
> > > Can
> > > the division between South Asian and South East Asian scripts be
> > > anything but a geographical division.

It is primarily geographic, of course. WWS has separate sections for
convenience; rarely have the two been studied together, and a single
introduction for both would have been almost impossible to get into two
pages.

More important are the distinctions _within_ SEA: some of the modern
scripts descend from Hindu models (i.e., ancestral Nagari), others from
Buddhist models (i.e., ancestral Pali); and the same script families
have been used for a huge variety of languages -- Tai, Mon-Khmer,
Malayo-Polynesian and probably others.

> > Legacy standards? or is there a difference because of the difference
> > in language families?
>
> There are two historical differences. There's a division between
> North Indian and South Indian scripts, and a difference between Indic
> languages and the rest. There are also hiddden issues because
> Devanagari was taken as the Indic language exemplar - Bengali might
> have been better.
>
> I'm not sure that Bengali is closely related to Devanagari - Bengali
> has <e> on the left and split vowels for <o> and <au>. In these
> respects it is like the South Indian scripts.

Bengali and Oriya are one subgroup, Devanagari and Gujarati the other,
of a single branch of North Indic. The distinction between North and
South Indic scripts does not coincide with the Indic/Dravidian
linguistic divide; nor does the overall visual effect. South Indic
scripts are rounded because of the palm-leaf medium, but so is Oriya.
Sinhala is a South Indic script for an Indic language. (Of course the
picture is much more complicated if you look at all the local varieties
that got swamped out by the 10 standardized varieties currently used in
India.)

> > That is why Tamil is so different
> > from other Indic scripts. It is from the same *script* family
> > historically but there are so many conceptual differences. The
> > concept of how the writing system works seems to vary from the Indic
> > language family considerably.

Language family has nothing to do with it. The other three literary
Dravidian languages use scripts indistinguishable in principle from
those of the Indic scripts: the nearly identical Kannada and Telugu, and
Malayalam. They've added letters for vowels and consonants not found in
Brahmi, but they work just the same.

> Not really. There is a problem in that the Tolkappiyam does not
> relate to the Indic script scheme, but that is about it. The main
> points are that having largely simplified the system by eliminating
> most conjuncts, it is then complicated by consonant-vowel ligatures,
> and the handling of stacks is trivial in Tamil.
>
> I wasn't joking when I suggested that visual Tamil could be handled as
> a variant of Thai.
>
> This doesn't help my search for a concept unifying SE Asian scripts.

Why would you want to unify a bunch of scripts with diverse origins used
for many diverse languages? What do they have in common but geography?
(I was going to say geopolitics, but there sure isn't any unity there.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...