Rule for sunna in transliteration

Ramana R. Juvvadi (juvvadi@horizoncomp.com)
Fri, 27 Sep 1996 18:46:29 -0400


I am very close to releasing lekha-1.0 which will let you view
Telugu in netscape. Of course, it is easy display Telugu as an
image, but that is not suitable for putting substanitial
amount of material. So I took an X font that Ananda Kishore designed
long ago and added missing letters. Also, I rescaled it so that it
appears in five different sizes. 

In the first phase it works only in unix. I'll port it to Windows/Mac
environments very soon. 

I am in the process of assembling material for a web site that can
be displayed in Telugu. I am  collecting  material that 
has already been typed in RIT.  
I want to collect a lot of material in RIT format and before
that happens I want to revisit one of the RIT rules.

And that is sunna generation. Here is what I am talking about. Suppose
you have a word like 'saranjAmA'. RIT automatically writes a sunna
after 'ra' instead of a ja-vattu under 'na'. Basically it looks at the
following letter to determine whether it should be sunna or something
else. The curent rule is 

	n followed by k K g G c C j J T D t d p P b B
or	m followed by k K g G c C j J T D t d p P b B l L s S h H v

is a sunna.


In my view this is a bad rule because, it makes words like
'pAnpu' as <pA><sunna><pu> instead of <pA><nu><pa-vattu>

In my view the correct rule for sunna should be

	n followed by k K g G c C j J T D t
or	m followed by p P b B l L s S h H v


There are some ambiguities. 'Amlamu' seems to indicate that m
followed by l should be a <ma><la-vattu> whereas 'ee taramlO'
seems to indicate that m followed by l should be a <sunna><l>

Comments, opinions, suggestions?


Ramana