Samyuktaksaras (Was: Vital Statistics)

[Allen W Thrasher]

To the proponents of the Roman script for S. Asian languages I would
suggest  that the conjunct forms of the consonants, although they are
not totally regular and predictable and do take time to learn either
for a native speaker or for others, once learned make for economy both
in reading and in writing by hand, and therefore in the use of the
written language once learned save effort.  They have produced
problems in the design of typewriters, to be sure, but S. Asia seems
to be jumping from handwriting to computers largely skipping the
typewriter for local languages.  The conjunct consonant graphs save
the excessive use of virama/halant on the one hand and avoid the
endless writing of a graph for short a on the other.

Allen Thrasher