Re: Tamil C(S)ivamayam

Bala (Sri Lanka) wrote:

> The civamayam is very commonly used in Tamil text. In present days 
> compare to day sign and Tamil number 2, the civamayam symbol used very 
> frequently.  This been used in start of books, almost 90% of the Tamil 
> wedding cards and so on.
>
> But when I am looking at the shape I cannot see the difference between 
> Tamil day sign and civamayam.

Neither can I, though both are clearly different from the digit 2.

> (1)    Why there is no code point to the civamayam symbol in Unicode? 
> Is that because of the same/similar glyph?

Perhaps.  Has anyone ever proposed encoding it separately?  Is it 
encoded separately in any other coded character encoding?

> Or Tamils missed out to list to Unicode?

I wouldn't recommend going down this path.

> (2)    Are we expected to use the 0BF3 – Tamil Day sign for civamayam 
> as well?

In American English, the same coded character, U+002E, is used:

* as a sentence terminator
* as a marker for certain abbreviations
* as a decimal separator
* as part of an ellipsis indicating continuation
* as a separator between parts of a URL or IP address
* as part of a "dotted leader" in a table of contents
* and probably for other purposes as well.

If you wish to propose disunifying the civamayam symbol from U+0BF3, you 
will probably need to explain how that situation differs from the U+002E 
situation.

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