Proposed Vedic Sanskrit Coding Scheme: Some suggestions Akshar Bharati Amba Kulkarni Department of Sanskrit Studies University of Hyderabad Hyderabad

Nature of Indian Scripts: क = क ् + अ का = क ् + आ क ् ष े = क् + ष् + ए

Salient Features of Indian Scripts – ' अ ' being the most frequent vowel in a syllable, the basic symbols of consonants were assumed to carry the vowel ' अ ' within them. – To represent concisely in less space, the concept of the secondary vowel signs or 'matra' must have been evolved.

Salient Features of Indian Scripts contd … – Syllable is a vowel optionally preceded by one or more consonants. Thus every syllable must have a vowel. – Orthographically the symbol corresponding to a vowel may be either to the left, or right or top or bottom position of the given consonant cluster.

Salient Features of Indian Scripts contd … – In ' वुद्धि ' viz. the vowel indicator orthographically precedes the consonant cluster, but is pronounced later. – Relation between Vowel and Vowel-indicator: क + ् + इ = क + ि or ि = ् + इ

Salient Features of Indian Scripts contd … – In case of consonant cluster, the consonants are written either from top to bottom or from left to right – Indian language scripts are syllabic in nature, and it has been a tradition to fall back to the alphabetic expansion. – Syllables are compositional in nature.

ISCII-91: problems – ISCII has codes for both the matras (vowel indicators) as well as the vowels. – Redundancy of vowel-indicators. – Not suitable for sandhi, search engines, etc. – Rendering engine is anyway necessary.

Unicode: Problems Based on ISCII-91  WORST of both the worlds a) Unity among Indian Scripts is lost (Separate pages for different language scripts) b) Increase in Storage Space

Advantages of the Proposed Scheme Redundancy in vowel indicators is gone. Rules for linguistic analysis follo Shastric texts The proposed InPa will be an important step towards evolving an IPA based on Devanagari/ Indian Scripts.

Phoneme Versus Syllables Sandhi Morphological Analysis Sorting Searching Display Meter (Chanda) analysis Speech processing Storage(less space)

Further Suggestions Treat all Indian Language scripts as different fonts with one underlying script –‘Indian Script’. Pool a space of 10 pages of 128 codes each, space enough for storing 1000 frequent syllables together with the basic phonemes. Define the UTF-8 encoding based on the relative addresses instead of absolute addresses.

Conclusion

Proposed Phoneme Based Scheme better than ISCII-91 as well as Unicode To preserve the unity and save on storage space: Treat Indian Scripts as Different Fonts, Pool the space for all Indian languages to Store frequent syllables, Use relative offset for UTF-8.