JTC1/SC2/WG2 N2620
L2/03-277
Comments on Proposal to Encode the Saurashtra Script in the UCS
Vide: ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N3607
LN/03-231
byPeri Bhaskararao
bhaskar@aa.tufs.ac.jp[Section numbers below refer to the section numbers in the original proposal]
Section: B6b.
There are two fonts (‘Kuber’ and ‘SURESH’) available at www.palkar.org As of2003.08.23, a couple of important glyphs are missing in these fonts. For instance, theglyphs for AB63 (as in the modified chart given at the end of this write-up) should havea subscript flourish. It is not there in either of the fonts. AB62 needs be a full-bodied
letter. However, it is available as a subscript in both the fonts. The Xenotype Saurashtra
font list (as seen in a PDF file) has both the glyphs. AB0B and AB37 are missing inKuber font. They are available in Suresh font.
C2c.
This subsection asks ‘whether any contact has been made to members of the user
community, and whether any relevant documents available’. The answer given was:N/A.
The proposal mentions that a contact was made with Mr. Kubendiran. However, nodocument is enclosed. The Kuber font which is named after Mr. Kubendiran (and isused in a magazine edited by him) seems to be defecient as mentioned under B6b above.
There is another Saurashtra person who has been recently appointed as the Honorary
Director of the Saurashtra Sabha Library and Museum in. He is Mr. O.S.Subramanian.
He has been trained in linguistics and contributed an appendix to the Saurashtra-English
dictionary of Prof. N.Ucida. I was told that he has his opinions about the so-called‘upaakSara’ as well as the need for a kind of ‘ja-phala’ for Saurashtra script. Mr.
Subramanian does not seem to be aware of the current proposal.
When I started asking about the originally proposed ‘Aayatam’ which was later changed
to ‘UpaakSara’, I received the following replies from one of the proposers:-------------Some of the answers from Mr.Jeyakumar, the first Proposer------------As I already enquired some of the sources in Madurai, Madras (Tamil Nadu)
and other local communitiy heads, I was not able to get any significant information about this AAYTAM
character. Please help me to sort out this issue.
-------------------------The Name of this Sign is "UPAKSHARA”--------------------------I got this information from Mr. K.G.Sethuraman. He is a retired professor and has authored several
books related to Saurashtra. He showed this information in his Book "Tamilnattil Saurashtirar
Muzhuvaralaaru". A Tamil book which explains about the history of Saurashtra in TamilNadu publishedin 1977. This year he has published a new Trilingual Dictionary (Saurashtra-Tamil-English). In this hehas given several examples using this sound.
-------------------------It will be straightforward and easier, if 'upakshara' sign is encoded in Saurashtra.

----------Correspondence between Peri Bhaskararao and Mr. Jeyakumar------------------ Peri Bhaskarararao <peri@yhb.att.ne.jp> wrote:
It is possible that the term 'upa-akSara' might have been coined by him.
Saurashtra script is an old script related to Modi script etc. Does Shri Sethuraman say where he got thisterm from?
------------------Mr. Jeyakumar’s answer----------------------I will contact Sri Sethuraman in this regard.
------------------------------- Peri Bhaskararao <peri@yhb.att.ne.jp> wrote----------------:
Do you happen to have a photocopy of any old Saurashtra written material (such as manuscript) where
the so-called 'upa-akSara's can be seen? If you have any such material, will it be possible for you to sendme a few scanned files with them?
------------------Mr. Jeyakumar’s answer----------------------I don't have any such manuscripts with me.
Few months back I gathered some of the hard copies of such scripts and printouts, and posted them toMichael Everson. In the 8th page of draft proposal document
http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n2xxx-saurashtra.pdf Michael has shown someexamples.

====================================
From the above scenario, it seems that a thorough discussion about various issues of thescript with some informed members of the Saurashtra community is still very muchneeded.
C4a. The context of use for the proposed characters : Rare
C5a. Are the proposed characters in current use by the user community + C5b. If YES,
where:
Yes + In Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat states of India. A monthly magazine
called BhaaSaabhimaani is published in Madurai, India.
----------Comments about the above items---------Saurashtra script is not currently used in Gujarat state. I was told that the number ofpersons who can claim proficiency in the script (reading and writing) is just about 3 or 4.
The rest of the ‘users’ use it for religious or cultural purposes. It is used on Wedding
Invitation cards, occasionally in a magazine, and on sign-boards. The magazine
BhaaSaabhimaani is not published in Saurashtra language. It is printed in Tamil scriptwith occasional use of Saurashtra letters. Figure 5 given in the original proposal itself
will vouch for this. In this figure, the whole explanation is in Tamil language and Tamil
script. The folio heading of the magazine is mostly in Tamil script and Tamil language.
Just the name ‘BhaaSaabhimaani’ is transliterated into Saurashtra script (that too aftergiving it in Tamil script first).
D. Proposal: The following comments on this section are in continuation with theabove comments:
However, the Saurashtra script has two important functions. One is ethnic identity. The
script could identify the group as a distinct group. All the members of this community
are bilinguals in Saurashtra language and the regional dominant language such as Tamiland Telugu. Usage of the script gives them a distinct identity. Usage of the script on
sign-boards also contributes to this feature of identity. The other function is cultural.

The script is used for writing sacred and ritually important materials such wedding
invitations. Perhaps it may be used for writing horoscopes etc. also. Another important
cultural aspect of the script is the availability of several manuscripts written in thisscript. Knowledge of the script gives the members of the community access to thesematerials. However, the glyph shapes of various characters differ considerably in thesemanuscripts. I just received a copy of a ‘Saurashtra Primer’ published by Litho-press
process in 1876 where the number of characters and glyph shapes are drasticallydifferent from what we see in the proposal. The proposal mentions ‘there are a number[of] TrueType implementations of the modern Saurashtra script in circulation on theinternet’. However, I could see just the two fonts (mentioned earlier) on the internet.
Even then, both of them are very similar in their general shapes. One provides moreglyphs of C+matra type. An interesting point is: “how is this ‘modern’ Saurashtra script
defined?” Is it defined by the very few fonts available on the internet? Who has
defined the usage of AB4D (halanta) sign to be compulsorily used after the first C in aconsonant cluster which is entirely different from all the other Indian Indic scripts
except Tamil? How much printed or written body of literature is available in the‘modern’ Saurashtra script that vouches for these glyph shapes?
The proposal further says “To date, no computer implementation of the older version of
the script has been created”. As explained elsewhere in this comment, there seems to be
not one but several older stages of the script which need to be taken into considerationin future. Precisely for this purpose, we need to have a wider character encoding
schema for this script exactly parallel to the Devanagari code chart.
The glyph shapes given in the proposal (as taken from the available fonts and theprinted materials) probably reflect their current usage. But if one goes about 50 years
into the past, the glyph shapes and the number of characters start differring. This wasclear from my perusal of the 1876 publication mentioned above as well as a couple ofother books that Prof. Ucida showed me recently.
Thus it is important to keep in mind the history of the script while encoding the current
stage. Looking at the rich variation in the script over its history, proposals for adding
some older characters will certainly arise. An example from Telugu and Kannada
scripts would be apt here. Corresponding to Tamil U+0BB4, Telugu U+0C34 and
U+0CB4 is kept blank. However, Devanagari has the character U+0934. It should berecalled that ISCII Devanagari (on which Uncode coding was primarily based), does notjust encode Devanagari as used for Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali or Newari. Itencodes what is called ‘pari-vardhita-devanaagarii’ (=extended Devanagari). Extended
Devanagari was created to cater to most of the characters that are found in Dravidian
languages as well as Bengali, in addition to the regular Devanagari characters. Now,after going through various linguistic materials on Telugu and Kannada I came to theconclusion that we need to provide characters for Telugu U+0C34 and U+0CB4. Thesetwo characters are used in writing Inscriptional Telugu and Kannada. I will be making aproposal in this regard soon. Similarly, we need to look into historical aspects ofSaurashtra script and provide space for characters that are used in their historical
documents. Saurashtra script is an Indic script. Just like Tulu and Grantha scripts it
was primarily used for writing down Saurashtra and Sanskrit materials (as well asTelugu materials). Hence, I propose the positioning of characters parallel to Devanagari
character set. This is in line with many other Indian scripts. I was told that one of thevery few users of the Saurashtra script would like to propose for inclusion of an
Anusvaara in the chart. Having a chart symmetrical with Devanagari chart would
facilitate any future additions.
UpaakSara: (spelt as ‘upakshara’ in the Proposal) [I will refer to it as H hereafter]:
There has been some good amount of discussion on this topic. First, the proposers
wanted to call it ‘Aayatam’ perhaps in analogy with the Tamil ‘aayatam’. However,Tamil Aayatam has its own specific characteristics. Its phonetic shape has not been
finally resolved. Its occurrence is very limited. The proposers later dropped this nameand took up the term ‘Upakshara’. As the discussion in C2c above indicates, it is notclear who coined this word. As far as its meaning in Sanskrit goes, it means ‘sub (upa)letter (akSara)’. This is obviously someone’s recent coinage.
H need not and should not be given the status of a character at this stage. The reasons
are the following:
1. The character-set of an Indic script has two groups of characters. The majorgroup contains characters which are direct representations of Graphemes. The
other group contains characters representing punctuation etc. A grapheme is anabstract element that is represented by one or more ‘allographs’. A glyph is aphysical token of an allograph. (Please see my document in Current Documents
L2/02-402 at http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2002/02402-indic.pdf for a longer
discussion on this.)
2. There are three basic premises in Graphemics (and in phonemics andmorphology). They are: Contrast, Complementation, and Free Variation. If twoelements occur in the same environment and bring about a difference in meaning,then those two elements are in ‘Contrastive distribution’. They cannot beinterchanged without changing the meaning. For instance, /p/ and /b/ contrast
in English (but not in Native Tamil vocabulary). If two elements occur inmutually exclusive environments, then they are said to be in ‘complementary
distribution’ or ‘predictable environments’. For instance the aspirated [ph] andthe unaspirated [p] in English (but in Hindi, they contrast). Their occurrence isderived by a rule. They form a set of allophones of the same phoneme (sayEnglish /p/). If two elements occur in contexts where one can replace the otherfreely, then they are in ‘free variation’.
3. I went through the whole of the ‘Saurashtra-English Dictionary’ by Prof.
N.Ucida. I met Prof. Ucida and discussed with him the issue. Here I discuss thegraphemic issue of H (not its phonology). All the occurrences of the four
sequences of <nH>, <mH>, <rH>, and <lH> are just surface phenomena ofunderlying sequences of {nh}, {mh}, {rh} and {lh}. {h} is represented at AB39
in the character chart given at the end of this comment. Thus, <h> and <H> areallographs of the underlying grapheme {h}. There is no single instance of <nh>,<mh>, <rh>, or <lh>. There is also not a single case of <XH> where <X> is aletter other than <n>, <m>, <r>, or <l>. This is classic case of allographic
distribution. There are several more parallel allographic cases in Devanagari
and other Indic scripts.

Formulaically:
Let N = <n>,<m>, <r>, or <l>
Let X ≠ <n>,<m>, <r>, or <l>
Rewrite {Nh} → <NH>
and {Xh} → <Xh}
For this reason, I do not recommend setting up of ‘H’ as a character. However,a glyph of ‘H’ will be necessary for rendering the typography which can be included in
the glyph set of the font.
Character Chart: I explained above the need for having the Saurashtra Code Chartwhich is parallel to the Devanagari chart. This will be highly necessary for any future
expansion of the code points as there are several other intricate letters in Saurashtra
manuscripts. By adapting the general Devanagari pattern, all the necessities of theSaurasthra script can be satisfactorily addressed. The proposed character chart follows.
The letter names of the above letters are the same as that of Devanagari letter names
given in Unicode 4.0, except the word ‘Devanagari’ needs to be replaced by the word
‘Saurashtra’.

Row AB : SAURASHTRA
AB0 AB1 AB201
2
3

4
5
6
7
8
9A
BCDEFAB3

AB4

W " j {>[{g² A { n {td > C N {=Q l{¥
D k L bE K o M {sF i O } {qR I ¾ m {wG UuT ; h{a+ : H{f\ p y{rP Y{BS } c {eJ ' / {<AB5 AB6 AB7%
|`
`
0123
4
56789