If you will consult e.g. Masica, *The Indo-Aryan Languages*, you will learn that Prakrits basically didn't have clusters, hence the rarity of Kharaosthi conjuncts in general, and the nonexistence of CVC syllables. Similarly, there was no need to mark words as final-vowelless, as Prakrit words did not end with a consonant.

If Unicode provides for something that doesn't occur in the data, that's Unicode's problem.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...



----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Wordingham <richard@...>
To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 9:04:44 PM
Subject: Kharoshthi CVC Orthographic Units (was:Theory of transliteration?)

--- In qalam@... com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@. ..> wrote:

> NO SUCH THING AS A CVC AKSHARA. AKSHARAS DON'T CORRESPOND TO
SYLLABLES, JUST TO SEQUENCES OF CONSONANTS.

It looks as though Kharoshthi also had CVC units. Unfortunately I
only have the Unicode Standard and the corresponding proposal (
http://std.dkuug dk/jtc1/sc2/ wg2/docs/ n2524.pdf )to go by, but I've no
evidence from it that CVC and CCV were written differently. I don't
know which language CVC was written for - both Tocharian B and
Sanskrit are possibilities. The WWS does not mention how final
consonants were written - unless it is saying, in seeming
contradiction to the Unicode description, that Kharsohthi final
consonants were written the same way as Brahmi final consonants -
smaller and with a horizontal stroke above. The idea is the same for
the two scripts, but the detail seems to matter. Or could Brahmi
final consonants sometimes be indistinguishable from subjoined consonants?

I presume there was no choice as to how a CVCCV sequence should be
broken up into orthographic units, because I can't see how CVC.CV and
CV.CCV would be encoded separately in Unicode. Unicode encodes CVC
with the 'virama' *after* the final consonant, rather than before it.

Richard.




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