Scholarly Documentation
Pallava Script Unicode Initiative
Systematic epigraphic evidence corpus supporting the official Unicode encoding
of the Pallava script — building on Anshuman Pandey's 2018 proposal (L2/18-083)
and contributing to the Unicode Technical Committee's active script work.
Compiled by Sidda Jagadeesh Donthi Siddappa · Independent Researcher
Unicode Submission Checklist
🔤
Complete character inventory (vowels, consonants, diacritics, conjuncts)
In Progress (~50 of ~100)
📜
Epigraphic evidence per character (minimum 3 attestations each)
Pending — building corpus
📊
Character frequency analysis across corpus
Pending — needs larger corpus
🔬
Comparative paleography (Pallava vs Grantha vs Brahmi)
Pending
📚
Scholarly citations compiled (Pandey 2018, Lockwood 2015, others)
Partial — 3 references
✍️
Formal Unicode proposal document drafted
Pending
🌐
Submitted to Unicode Technical Committee (UTC)
Pending
Future-Proof Migration Plan
When Pallava script receives official Unicode approval:
1. The Unicode Consortium will publish official codepoints for each Pallava character.
2. Update the unicode_official field in pallava_pua_chart.json for each character.
3. Run the migration script: py -3 migrate_to_official_unicode.py
4. All corpus entries, knowledge base chunks, and training data will be updated automatically.
5. PUA codepoints remain valid as aliases — no data is lost.
The five-layer architecture ensures zero data loss — IAST and glyph images are
encoding-independent and remain valid regardless of which Unicode codepoints are eventually assigned.