Talk:Ja (Indic)

Meaning of Correspondence
In the subsection on Thai, what is the intended meaning of "Cho chang corresponds to the Sanskrit character 'ज'"? Does it mean one of the following:


 * 1) Cho chang corresponds to the Devanagari character 'ज' in the writing of Sanskrit?
 * 2) Cho chang corresponds to the Devanagari character 'ज' in the writing of words of Sanskrit origin?
 * 3) Both of the above?
 * 4) Something else?

The facts can get complicated in some cases. --RichardW57 (talk) 08:15, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Intended Order of Sections
Is there an intended order of sections? --RichardW57 (talk) 23:10, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

The commented out headings in Tha (Indic) onwards imply a partial ordering:

Gurmukhi, Tamil, Kannada, Sinhala, Thai, Lao, Tibetan, Burmese, Khmer, Philippine, Tagbanwa, Lontara, Balinese, Sundanese, Limbu, Tai Le, New Tai Lue, Lepcha, Saurashtra, Rejang, Cham, Tai Viet.

The best I can work out for all the scripts that appear, assuming that extant sections other than those for Khmer and Tai Tham that I have inserted are usually in the correct order, is:

Historic, Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Javanese, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada. Malayalam, Syllabics, Sinhala, Thai, Lao, Odia, Tibetan, Burmese, and then as above.

I have been putting Tai Tham immediately before New Tai Lue.

However, agreement is not perfect. Gurmukhi and then Gujarati would fit just as well. Burmese precedes Thai twice (Ṅa and Ṭa) with no cases the other way round. Odia precedes Telugu for Kha. Thai precedes Javanese and Malayalam for Ṅa, Ca, Ja nad Ta, but Malayalam precedes Thai for Ga, Gha, Cha and Jha.

We have the entry sequence Odia, Tibetan, Gurmukhi for Ḍha, Dha and Bha, but Tibetan comes some way after Gurmukhi for Kha.
 * Short answer: No, there is no intended order of sections. There is a bias towards better known and more complex scripts being higher on the page, but that is an artifact of the page sections being created in an order informed by factors like pre-existing letter and conjunct images already uploaded to commons, availability of high-quality fonts for creating those images, and whether the structure of the script is interesting enough to merit putting in the legwork to upload supporting content. VanIsaac, MPLLcont WpWS 00:34, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
 * In that case, I am inclined to follow the order of the section on encoding, so anyone who dives into the series as a reference work has only one arrangement to memorise. Presumably rearrangement should be in separate edits to changes of content.  Long contents lists are irritating to read through in detail.  Now, some people may read the article from start to finish.  For them, it may then be better to move the Khmer family to before the Myanmar family, because Thai, which is put in the Khmer family, has heavily influenced the Tai Tham script and seems to have both old and recent influences on the Shan varieties of the Burmese script.  (The 'old' might in fact be a recent influence via Tai Tham, the writing system of the 'Shan' system of Kengtung - I need to check the history.) --RichardW57 (talk) 08:48, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Actually, the 'historic scripts' should still come first. There's a definite tension between the present and history - it seems natural to keep the original ISCII-encoded scripts at the beginning of the encoding section.  I think L1½ headers to group scripts would be useful - but I see no way of implementing them.  I don't want to demote the scripts to L3, and I certainly don't want the letters to drop out of the table of contents. --RichardW57 (talk) 06:34, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Gurmukhi subscript
Unicode proposal document [|Proposed Changes to Gurmukhi 2 L2/05-167] asserts the existence of the subscript and even proposes a name for it. We can say that the subscript is obsolete, but we can only deny its existence if this proposal is wrong. The denial of its existence was added by, who may have relevant sources. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:45, 15 November 2021 (UTC)