ISOIECJTC1SC2WG2N4494L213-204.PDFVIP

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N4494 L2/13-204 2013-10-28 Title: Proposal to Encode Latin Letters for the Transliteration of Indic Vocalic Letters Author: Anshuman Pandey (pandey@) Status: Individual Contribution Action: For consideration by UTC and WG2 Date: 2013-10-28 1 Introduction This is a proposal to encode the following eight characters as part of the “Latin Extended-D” block in the Universal Character Set (ISO/IEC 10646): ????? ???? ????????? ???? L? A7B0 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH RING BELOW l? A7B1 LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH RING BELOW L?? A7B2 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH RING BELOW AND MACRON l?? A7B3 LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH RING BELOW AND MACRON R? A7B4 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R WITH RING BELOW r? A7B5 LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH RING BELOW R?? A7B6 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R WITH RING BELOW AND MACRON r?? A7B7 LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH RING BELOW AND MACRON The author understands that the Unicode Technical Committee tends presently towards disapproval of pro- posals for encoding precomposed characters for Latin, but the matter deserves a formal review as the pro- posed characters are part of a widely-used, legacy scholarly encoding and an existing ISO standard. 2 Background The eight proposed characters are prescribed by the international standard ISO 15919:2001 “Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters” for the transliteration of vocalic letters used for writing Sanskrit. These letters — r?, r??, l?, l?? and their upper case forms — are used, respectively, for transliterating? U+090B DEVANAGARI LETTER VOCALIC R,? U+0960 DEVANAGARI LETTER VOCALIC RR, ? U+090C DEVANAGARI LETTER VOCALIC L, ? U+0961 DEVANAGARI LETTER VOCALIC LL and corresponding characters in other Indic scripts. They represent phonemically and semantically distinct letters of Indic scripts. The under-rings and macrons are inherent aspects of the transliterated forms and the combination is considered an atomic letter in these systems. Various combining marks may be adde