[INDOLOGY] Unicode: Pabuchi and Ranjana

[Stefan Baums]

Dear Paul,

>> I know that there has been an effort to make a Ranjana/Lantsa
>> unicode script from Anshuman Pandey since at least 2016.

there was talk of encoding Rañjanā when I was at Berkeley around
2011, between the Mangalam Center and Deborah Anderson and her
Script Encoding Initiative, and preliminary suggestions by Everson
(2009) and Manandhar, Karmacharya and Chitrakar (2014). Anshuman
then wrote his discussion paper in 2016:

   https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16015-ranjana.pdf

I do not know what the remaining issues are.

> if you look closely at Gujarati (U+0A80-0AFF), Kannada
> (U+0C80-0CFF), and others you will see that the single and
> double daṇḍas are mapped to the Devanāgarī block characters
> (U+0964 & U+0965). That being said, if you look at Indic scripts
> in the SMP (Secondary Multilingual Plane) such as Brahmi
> (U+11000-1107F), that is not the case

That is also the doing of Andrew and me, in our Brāhmī encoding
proposal from 2003:

   https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2003/03249r-brahmi-proposal.pdf

that entered Unicode in 2010. I think for the discrete daṇḍas, we
just followed our precedent with Kharoṣṭhī.

Maybe only of historical interest now, but I originally intended
the proposal to cover all pre-modern Brāhmī-derived scripts
(possibly including Rañjanā), much like all European variants of
the Latin script have the same encoding, see the original proposal
and this companion article:

   https://stefanbaums.com/publications/baums_2006_3.pdf

There are advantages and disadvantages to such character
unification.

> ambiguous glyphs in proto-Bengali script(s) are fraudulently
> rendered as distinct in Devanāgarī

If you are thinking of things like the va vs. ba issue, then it
still seems to me that separate code blocks are not absolutely
necessary, just as the editor of a Latin text might decide to only
use the letter u (not v) for both vowel and consonant to avoid
subjective decisions, without needing to resort to separate Uncial
(or whatever) codepoints for that.

All best,
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Baums, Ph.D.
Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie
Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität München