[INDOLOGY] Sinhala half nasal plus m

Sat Aug 6 18:44:54 UTC 2016

Unicode has a single character for glyphs in sanskrit devanagari and
related scripts that use diacriticals in transliteraton such * ā ī ñ ṁ *.etc.
 but Sinhala uses extra characters that are not used in the other
devanagari or related scripts such as the m with chandra above it that Rolf
asked about.  If that is not in Unicode then that is a serious fault with
Unicode because then you can't encode all characters of ISO15919 in
Unicode.  It may be there but I couldn't find it.

There are unicode characters for accents (grave, accute, underline and
others)  that can be combined with other characters.  This is what the Mac
allows with the US extended keyboard  So theoretically documents containing
text with accents added this way should be transferable accross platforms
as long as each platform uses a unicode font that contains those accents.
If they don't show up accross platforms its possible this is a font
problem. or its possible that the rendering software doesn't interpret this
unicode feature correctly. .Hans are you experiencing problems going from
Word on Mac to Word on PC, or is it from Word on Mac to publishing software
on Mac or PC, or  something else?

Harry  Spier

On Sat, Aug 6, 2016 at 12:57 PM, Hock, Hans Henrich <hhhock at illinois.edu>
wrote:

> What complicates matters is that one can assemble characters such as the
> “chandra m” (*m̆*) by means of rendering machines, but the outcome is not
> a single “glyph”.
>
> What do I mean by this?
>
> On the Mac, if you have enabled US Extended (or its later successor) and
> use a Unicode-compatible font such as Times New Roman, you can produce the
> character by typing in *m* and then type Shift-Option b. But while many
> “ordinary” combinations of diacritics plus base character are encoded as a
> single “glyph” (i.e., a unitary entity), other combinations such as *m* +
> Shift-Option b are not. As a consequence, they are unstable across
> platforms or word-processing applications. In some cases, they do make it
> across platforms, as long as one doesn’t try to edit; in other cases, they
> show up as a blank from the start. (I found out about this and related
> issues when producing the documents from which *The languages and
> linguistics of South Asia* were printed, especially in exchanging files
> with my coeditor, Elena Bashir, who uses a PC, and then with the Mouton
> printers.)
>
> This problem is, annoyingly, an issue for many other, more common
> characters (at least in Indology), such as *ā́*, i.e. *a* with macron and
> accent. Not being a Unicode “geek”, I can’t tell whether this is a problem
> of the word-processing application, the rendering machine, or an absence of
> such single glyphs in Unicode. Perhaps some colleagues can enlighten us on
> this issue.
>
> All the best,
>
> Hans Henrich Hock
>
>
> On 5 Aug 2016, at 17:23, Harry Spier <hspier.muktabodha at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ISO 15919 has m with the chandra sign above it for this character, but I
> also could not find this in a unicode font.  Is it possible that there is
> no unicode slot for this  character.  That would mean that some ISO 15919
> characters are not in Unicode.
>
> Harry Spier
>
> On Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 9:27 AM, Rolf Heinrich Koch <
> rolfheiner.koch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear list members,
>>
>> there is one Sinhala sign consisting of a half-nasal with following ba,
>>
>> like in a-m-ba (mango).
>>
>>
>> Unicode has a half-nasal for n, e. g. paňdita.
>>
>> But I could not figure out the corresponding sign for the half-nasal m.
>>
>> Since the anusvara ṃ is also frequent in Sinhala, I am using ṁ for
>> transcribing the half nasal m, e. g. aṁba.
>>
>>
>> My work does not allow the composition of signs with the help of an
>> additional accent.
>>
>>
>> Anyone came across the Unicode-standard for he half nasal of m?
>>
>>
>> Best
>>
>>
>> Rolf Heinrich Koch
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> www.rolfheinrichkoch.wordpress.com
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>>
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