Assamese Alphabets

We are presently working on a Assamese font set that can be used with LaTex. The Assamese script has 41 consonants and 11 vowels. These are similar to the Devnagari script which is used by Sanskrit, the classical language of India, and <ahref=" readme" itrans-4.0 pub chandra.astro.indiana.edu ftp:Hindi, the present national language. (Check out the ASCII/Indian-script song book for Sanskritand <ahref=" hindex.html" hindi isongs chandra.astro.indiana.edu:80 http:Hindi) The language has a number of juktakhars which are combination of consonants. They are not simple juxtaposition, rather some combination of modified versions of the consonants. Surprisingly about 80 of them exists and each of them need to be defined in the font for a complete representation. Another characteristic of Sanskrit based language is the use of post-consonantal forms of the vowels. Unlike the Roman script, a vowel used after a consonant changes form and gets attached to the consonant. The Latex font development system Meta font allows implementation of such constructs by defining ligatures in the font. A few constructs, that cannot be implemented in metafont, will be implemented by using a text pre-processor. Such a pre-processor is needed to make the writing of the Assamese text using Roman alphabets easy and readable. 
Vowels
The Assamese vowels are shown below:

The phonetic representation of the vowels are: 
a
aa
i
ii
u
uu
ree

e
oi
o
au
Consonants
The Assamese consonants:

The phonetic representation of the consonants are: 
ka
kha
ga
gha
unga
ca
cca
ja
jha
niya
ta
tha
da
dha
na
ta
tha
da
dha
na
pa
pha
ba
bha
ma
ja
ra
la
wa

xa
xa
xa
ha

khya
ya
Ra
Ra

The last four characters are called khanda-ta, anuswar, bixarga, chandrabindu. The third and fourth rows are similar sounds but differ on the stress. The three xa are a special sound not seen in other Sanskrit based language. They can be either termed as gutteral-kha or soft-sa. 
Post-Consonantal forms 


We see here the application of aa, i, ii, u, R, e, oi, o, au to the consonant ka. Note that the consonant R also has a post consonantal form. 
Combinatorial forms: juktakhars 


These are some examples of the juktakhars used in the Assamese script. The following list shows the combinations represented by each letter of the image. 
l+l
h+b
d+b
d+dh
n+d
l+p
n+n
t+t
k+t
p+l
x+m



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