Re: [aspell-devel] [aspell #336454] Aspell Malayalam

[Praveen A]

2007/7/2, Kevin Atkinson <address@hidden>:
> Hi.  I do not fully understand the issue as I do know very little about
> Malayalam.  Can you please explain it to to me or give me a link that does.

I will try to summarise the issue. Malayalam has a set of characters
called "chillu" (or pure consonants) which are not basic characters
but derivatives of the basic characters and so they don't have a
codepoint in unicode as of now.

So to render these characters unicode special character ZWJ is used.
So if you want to create a "chillu" then what you do is use a
combination of the base consonant (has a codepoint in the range
allotted to Malayalam) + halant (again has a codepoint in the range
allotted to Malayalam) +  ZWJ (unicode special character u+200d and
which is not in the range of Malayalalam). I think many other
languages also use ZWJ for example see this
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/persian/persianword/zwj.htm

In the same way to prevent conjunct formation ZWNJ (u+200c) is used.
So I guess the issue can be solved if Malayalam is allowed to have ZWJ
and ZWNJ (and sometimes ZWS but rare).

Let me know if anything is not clear.
> On Mon, 2 Jul 2007, Gora Mohanty wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 2007-07-02 at 15:02 +0530, Santhosh Thottingal wrote:
> >> Forwarding to this mailing list.
> >> As Gora said it is strange to make users knows about ZWJ and ZWNJ, but
> >> there is no other way to solve the specific problem of chillaksharas.
> >> We are trying to minimize this problem by using transliteration based
> >> keyboards. Inscript Keyboard layout users must know about these
> >> codepoints as of now.

Users know of these as the keyboard layout has positions for these
characters and transliteration input methods use _,~ to use this.

> If you wish to use some unused code points for this purpose you can make
> use of the private use area.  Just let me know how many you need and I
> will assign them for this purpose within Aspell.  This way there is no
> possibility of a conflict.

Would it be possible to give exceptions for this characters for Malayalam?

Cheers
Praveen
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