Subject: Re: bug#55539: 28.1; Support for the Kharoṣṭhī Script

From: Stefan Baums <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Jun 2022 20:45:55 +0200

> Great! The Kharoshthi script is finally being included in Emacs!

Thank you. About time, isn’t it?

> Should Kharoshthi be written with diacritics? I know Kharoṣṭhī
> is more correct way to write it, but other Indic scripts are
> written without it.

The convention among those working with it is to use diacritics,
so I opted for that in the visible name of the script, but for the
(or rather, a) form without diacritics in file names and code.

> If this is a more correct way, should the others be changed as
> well?

That is not up to me to decide, but I would not be opposed to
“Brāhmī” for parallelism.

> Also I noticed that Kharoṣṭhī and Gāndhārī are written in IAST
> but not Saṃskṛta.

The difference here is that “Sanskrit” is much more part of the
English language (in dictionaries etc.) than “Kharoṣṭhī” and
“Brāhmī.”

> since now there is also a misc-lang.el in lisp/leim/quail/ I
> think the Kharoshthi input method should be moved there.

I had a look. That file is billed as

   Quail package for inputting Miscellaneous characters

which is a bit of misnomer, as it only contains input rules for
the Hanifi Rohingya script. Why did you not give that script its
own input file, as has been the practice so far?

Also because the Kharoṣṭhī rules are quite numerous, I would
prefer for them to stay in their own file.