Re: Malayalam Zero - an error?

From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Apr 06 2005 - 16:33:43 CST

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    I am not suggesting adding any symbols
    for fractions in Tamil or Malayalam.
    There are tons of fractions in Tamil, for
    example. Nowadays, the Hindu-Arabic numerals
    and decimal system has replaced all these.

    If the claim is correct, the glyph for Zero
    need to be changed. That's all.

    Malayalam zero in line with
    all other Indian zero digits needs to be
    checked.

    (a)
    Varghese Chacko, a native Malayalam speaker,
    has reported the problem to Unicode.
    http://www.unicode.org/~emuller/iwg/p29/
    [Begin Quote]
    The glyph given at location 0x0D66 is not '0'(Zero) as
    said in your documents(U0D00.pdf) The symbol you have
    given is the glyph for '1/2'. Malayalam has its own glyph
    for '3/4','1/2','1/4','1/8' etc... and the glyph for '0'(Zero) in
     Malayalam is similar to one given at 0x0D02.
    [End Quote]

    (b) Look at:
    http://www.omniglot.com/language/numerals2.htm

    Here too, the Malayalam zero is just similar to
    any other Indian language digit Zero.

    Let me check K. P. Mohanan's chapter 38.
    Also, can Ken give me a refernce of Nakanishi, 1980?
    May be Ken is right, but the variance with
    all other Indian digit zero and (a) and (b)
    makes me suspect whether the glyph for Malayalam zero
    is right. If this glyph is zero, then how does
    1/2 symbol look? ...

    Also, I would like to see usage samples of 1 and 1/2
    in Malayalam books.

    N. Ganesan



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