StephenMorey
commented
3 years ago Hi Ben. Firstly, in relation to the two 'visarga' symbols which on my font were at upper case C and X - these are simple /a/ vowels, perhaps more frequently associated with a short /a/ in the manuscripts. They are really variants but I suspect it might be useful to have both in the font, so if we can use 1038 and 109C, I think it's a good idea.
Secondly, yes I think we can include the round -aa vowel ◌ာ [other 102C] as a variant of the Khamti ◌ၢ [1062]. I hadn't thought about this before, but perhaps 1062 was added without fully realising that it is a 'modern Khamti' version of 102C. So I'm happy for it to be included at either 102C or 1062, but given that 1062 is the one used for Khamti then let's put it there
Thirdly, in connection with the u and o, I've put up a post on Facebook just now
ohbendy
Stephen's Phake Ramayana PDF shows us a couple of vowel signs that don't appear in UTN 11 for Phake language.
We seem to have both the visarga း [1038] and Aiton vowel sign -a ႜ [109C] — are these distinct characters or would they just be different expressions of the same character depending who's writing the text?
The final letter on the first line seems to be the round -aa vowel ◌ာ [102C] but UTN11 doesn't include that letter in the Phake repertoire. The Khamti repertoire includes ◌ၢ [1062] so if we include this glyph, should we use 102C or 1062?
In our emails, Stephen wanted to make sure we support the -u vowel ◌ု [102F] with the -o vowel ◌ွ [103D]. In some manuscripts these seem to be touching and in other ones they have a bit of a gap between the two elements, so I'm not sure which way people prefer:
Unicode would need these to be stored as 103D 102F so if people want to type them the other way the keyboard would need to switch them.