Inherent vowel sound or transcription?
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[i did a quick review of the document. This is the first of a number of issues i'm raising as a result.]
1.2 Indian language complexities
http://w3c.github.io/ilreq/#h-h_indian_language_complexities
They are all abugidas in which most symbols stand for a consonant plus an inherent vowel (usually the sound /a/).
The /.../ indicates a phonemic representation, which in this case i believe is actually /ə/, whereas the 'a' is a common transliteration form. I suspect that either the a should be changed to ə, or the slashes should be replaced with quotes.
The changes have been made.
In Hindi the inherent vowel does tend to be [ə] if not stressed, but [ə] as the inherent vowel is not really more common than [ɐ, a, ɔ…] in various languages.
Actually I think ILReq should really be cautious on its scope. Such phonetics/phonology information is hardly relevant to this doc and could be misleading if not elaborated.
/a/ is phone_m_ic notation, not phone_t_ic notation. Therefore, to expand on Panini ("a a"), we may write /a/ but say [ɐ].