Date 26-12-2007 By Pravin Satpute

Writing Kashmiri Language using Devanagari Script


Writing Kashmiri in Devanagari Script using Unicode is still a problem and Still need a solution

Problems:

  1. Kashmiri Language is rich in vowels sounds, it has 17 vowels sounds. See Fig 1


    Fig 1

  1. Existing Devanagari code page doesn't have characters for vowels & corresponding matras for sounds 'I' & 'I:'. Refer 3rd Line in Fig 1


Fig 2


  1. Earlier comment was , these two matras looks like Gurumukhi matras 'u' U+0A41 & 'uu' U+0A42, so we can use same in Kashmiri Language also, but that solution has many problems.

    1. The Gurumukhi shape it not same as require in for Kashmiri language. See Fig 3


Fig 3


    1. Gurumukhi u+0A41 & u+0A42 provides different sounds.

    2. Using characters of Different script for one language is very problematic for NLP

      Operations. Identification of Script will be problematic.

    3. Rendering Engine(Pango, ICU & Uniscribe) Doesn't supports mixing of script for one language, as they treats each script differently. Also they are treating these mix characters of different script as different syllable (Bramhi Script).

      http://kaulonline.com/kalusa/koshur/unicode.htm

    4. Using Only these two matras will not solve the problems since we also need code point for vowels.


Conclusion:

We need a four code point in Existing Devanagari Code page U+0900, for Characters shown below


Mean while we can use private user area for these characters.






References:

“Kashmiri Primer”
Author : Dr. Roop K Bhat
NORTHERN REGIONAL LANGUAGE CENTRE
Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore,


2) http://kaulonline.com/kalusa/koshur/unicode.htm