From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Sun Apr 03 2005 - 07:42:19 CST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
To: "Unicode Discussion" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 03, 2005 12:35 PM
Subject: Re: Tamil Aytham
> At 10:28 +0100 2005-04-03, Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:
>
>>My technical answers will be sent in reply to original subject tag.
>>This is to discuss the historicity of Aytham. Your openion on this matter
>>sounds speculative.
>
> My opinion on this matter is based on the known history of Brahmic
> writing.
>
>>Tamil and Sinthu (Sindu) writing system had very close relationship in
>>ancient Indian history. No such things as Grantha nor Sanskrit existed at
>>that time.
>
> The Tamil script did not predate Tamil Grantha.
>
Tamil existed as a natural language, before Grantha was artificially
created.
Tamil script existed (not as we use it now) before Grantha was started.
>>Sindu has it's histric evidence to show that Phonemic and Graphemic
>>hybrids were the system of that time. You can trace the traces of
>>charactershapes of Indic languages to Sindu/Harapa times.
>
> The Brahmic scripts do not derive from the Indus script, if this is what
> you mean by Harappan.
Yes Bramic also drives from Indis script. I'll put together some evidence
later and post it.
>
>>There came a system Alphabet based PHONEMIC. That was Tamil. The new
>>arrival Grantha insisted on moving from Alphabet based Phonemic to
>>Phonemic only system. This is the results of present day descrepencies.
>>This happened to Aytham too. Tamil kept the simple and sophisticated
>>Aytham. Grantha moved on with complicated and possibly sophisticated "all
>>of them".
>
> This is anachronistic invention on your part.
>
It is the reality. I do not invent. I have the evidense. may be we discuss
this in one of a related forums.
>>As for consonants and vowels, Grantha misses many phonemes in everyday
>>use, but gives great emphasis for the selected phonemes while Tamil has
>>vast pool of Phonemes in everyday use with minimal alphabet based on
>>phonemes. (See an example
>>http://www.geocities.com/avarangal/ch-isai.pdf ).
>
> Apparently this is some sort of proposal for Tamil script reform. The use
> of the cedilla with Tamil letters is rather disturbing.
Diacritics was not needed for native Tamils. At present there is need, among
the many reasons, the diaspora's need is an important element and as you can
see it helps to discuss in this forum too. Cedilla has been in use since
just before the time of Unicode inception and I'll inform the concern re
cedilla, but lately Unicode also class this as combining diacritic and do
not know if this code range is ristricted to certain language group.
As for proposals, no, not yet, it might take some time before someone start
to talk to Unicode about this. Though, unristricted facilities, like the
8859 openness, from Unicode can help. Otherwise this can stick with 8bit
till such times.
> --
> Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
>
Sinnathurai Srivas
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