Query on Myanmar visarga

[ohbendy]

Description

Myanmar tonemark characters u+1069–106D are used in Western Pwo and Asho languages. In Western Pwo the visarga u+1038 is also used as a tonemark, but (I think) a Western Pwo syllable can contain only one tonemark, meaning visarga won't occur with any of 1069–196D.

However, in Asho language the visarga is considered a vowel component, not a tonemark. As we see here, it can also operate with other vowel graphemes (meaning it should not become separated from those vowel graphemes):

Asho uses 1069–106D as tonemarks, and those should follow any vowel sequence as shown here (u+1000 1038 1069 and 1000 1060 1038 1069 in the two right-hand boxes):

Currently the spec for Myanmar allows visarga only at the end of a syllable and the tonemarks before it. Text with the tonemarks following visarga are rendered with dotted circles:

Some real-life Asho texts showing tonemarks following the visarga:

Page URL

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/script-development/myanmar#well

Content source URL

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/typography/blob/live/typographydocs/script-development/myanmar.md

[behdad]

cc @dscorbett