I'm working on making several Turkestan Brahmi fonts. Currently I'm working on Khotanese (aka South Turkestan Brahmi) and Tocharian (aka North Turkestan Brahmi), and I'm considering making a Khotanese "cursive" one as well.
Examples of my fonts:
Khotanese:
Tocharian:
I want to set these up as proper unicode fonts in the Brahmi range but I don't have anything more than a basic knowledge of opentype, and have so far failed in my attempts to set up an Indic script in Unicode. If anyone knows anything about this I would really appreciate some explanation.
I know from the TITUS website that there is a manuscript somewhere that has the entire alphabet printed on it. If I sort through the hundreds of images on the Dunhuang Project site, I may come across it and finally find out what Khotanese jha looks like. A lot of the Dunhuang images are the same documents as the transliterations on TITUS, but they're classified under different systems and not cross referenced so I have no idea which one is which without reading each one and and searching for the text on TITUS.2+3 clusivity wrote:I think that the rareness of <jh> is probably due to its rareness in Sanskrit. This source hints at that rareness: http://www.hakuoh.ac.jp/camnavi/kyoken_ ... c_2004.pdf at page 13, and I think Colin Masica's Indo-aryan languages says something similar but I am not finding the correct page.clawgrip wrote:Voiced aspirates are even more rare, so rare in fact that I have never found an example of jh, so I have no idea what it looks like or if it even exists.
As an aside also, notice Khotanese's developement's on pp. 70 and 74 in the source quoted above more closely match the results of Vedic regarding both (af)fricat(iv)es and retroflexes than those in other Iranian languages in http://www.academia.edu/1748443/Introdu ... in_German_ on pp. 10-12. And, most tellingly the maintenance/development of voiceless aspirates in Khotanese seems to--perhaps--mirror those in Vedic. Based on phonology alone, I would be tempted to lump Khotanese into the Aryan ~ Dardic branch of Indo-Iranian.
I am not sure if you have seen this, which may be very helpful: http://books.google.com/books?id=QtpQZ1 ... 22&f=false, specifically the discussion on pp. 381-82 and the illustration on p. 380.clawgrip wrote:I know very little about the Khotanese language itself. My font, of course, only represents the script. Of course, I have created a number of ligatures that commonly appear in the script. Mostly the only things I know about Khotanese I have garnered from spending a lot of time looking at texts (I can tell for instance that it must have cases or something similar, because I've seen various words with changes to the final vowels, like gyastä balysä, gyastu balysu, gyastä balysi, etc.). I do know that certain ligatures actually represent individual phonemes, like ys I believe is /z/ or something similar, and that ṣṣ and śś are not geminates but digraphs representing single phonemes.