Nepali Fonts Standard

Nepal Codes for Information Interchange White Paper v2 Font Standardisation Working Committee, 1997 page 6 This means, for example, that the short “i” ( Ê ) is typed after the consonant, and stored after the consonant, even though for printing it comes before the consonant: the movement of the “Ê ” glyph to before the consonant is determined by the intelligence of the print rendering system. In ISCII, to represent a conjunct the component consonants are typed and stored with explicit halants to remove the implicit short ‘a’ vowels, thus “C ß 8” is rendered as “F”. However, there are some problems with the particular approach taken in ISCII: they encode both the vowel character and matra unnecessarily, and have chosen to use the non-phonetic halant with a short “a” ($)implied with all consonants. There has been powerful criticism from within India on these and other grounds. It is understood that during a recent review of ISCII an encoding was proposed without the halant but an explicit short “a” and with no matras. In this approach to render “F” the internal coding would be “C 8$”. An earlier version of ISCII was adopted for the Unicode tables, and it is Unicode with its adoption by Microsoft and many other suppliers of software that make it important that we in Nepal take note of the ISCII approach, and adopt an encoding that exploits the intelligence available in the rendering systems such as TrueTypeOpen. However for Nepal we do have the freedom to adopt either the halant-matra approach of the original ISCII, or the explicit vowel approach of ISCII’s critics. 4. Special Features of Nepal’s languages There are three aspects of the languages of Nepal that require special consideration. Three conjuncts as new consonants While it is true that Nepali uses the character set of Devanagari, some developments peculiar to Nepali have taken place. Three of the conjuncts of Devanagari - ksha 4, tra i , and gya : - have become letters of the Nepali alphabet, placed at the end after ha ®. Grammarians of Hindi and Sanskrit would view this as wrong, that the conjuncts should be broken down into their constituent consonants, and treating these conjuncts as new consonants would be wrong for Hindi; but it is right for Nepali. Chandrabindu and anuswar Note that in Nepali the chandrabindu and anuswar are not really distinct. For vowel nazalisation both diacritics are used in the writing, but only as alternatives - Acharya (1991) describes “ ¿¿ ” (which he terms ‘anuswar’) for this but notes that “ ÁÁ ” may also be used ‘inconsistently’ (page 70), while Mitchell describes these as alternatives with the “ ¿¿ ” above vowels that do not go above the line, and “ ÁÁ ” for vowels that do, but terms these the opposite way round as ‘chandrabindu’ and ‘anusvar’ respectively (pages 5 and 7). Further the use of “ ÁÁ ” to denote a general nasal consonant, the nasal consonant of the varg of the consonant that follows, Mitchell states that “there is a growing tendency to use the nasal consonant in preference to anusvar” (p16); Acharya calls this ‘sirbindu’ and notes inconsistencies in its use (page 70). For example anka (number) can be written “$Á/” or “$D” with the common practice in Nepal being the latter - “C” is the nasal consonant of the first varg to which “/” belongs. All this suggests that for Nepali, there should only be one code for both chandrabindu and anuswar as vowel modifiers, and that which form this takes would be dependent upon the font and how it is rendered. However, Newari does require both of these, so they are both required in Nepal. It also suggests that the use of anuswar as a consonant nazalisation modifier may not be necessary and be introduced as part of the rendering system. Glottal stops Some languages of Nepal, like Limbu, use a glottal stop. Glottal stops are produced by the complete closure of the throat at the vocal chords (the glottis) and then its sudden release. Glottal stops occur in Arabic and related languages, but do not occur in Nepali or English (though they occur in the English Cockney accent in word like “bottle” where the “tt” is ‘swallowed’ and replaced by a glottal stop).

Nepali Fonts Standard

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