From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sun Jun 26 2005 - 10:30:14 CDT
From: suzanne mccarthy <suzmccarth@yahoo.com>
>Work on early Tamil Brahmi by Iravatham Mahadevan has also shown
>that Tamil Brahmi was not an abugida like the other Brahmi scripts.
>It did not have an inherent a.
>
>http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2013/stories/20030704000207100.htm
The page states that "MA KA NA" is read "MA KA N". So what? Modern
Hindi does the same; that does not mean that Devanagari has ceased to
be an abudiga, and it does not mean that Tamil is not an abugida
either.
This is all about making Tamil special and different from Devanagari.
It is not linguistic science.
>View the table on early Tamil at the bottom of this page.
>
>http://www.cmi.ac.in/gift/Epigraphy/epig_tamilorigin.htm#top1
The author of this site has as his agenda that Ashokan Brahmi derives
FROM Tamil. Such revisionism is not interesting.
>It is also interesting to note that Isaac Taylor 1883 in The
>Alphabet represented Tamil as an alphabet. The consonant plus pulli
>was shown as the basic unit unlike all other Brahmi derived scripts.
The pulli kills the inherent vowel of the abugida.
>Diderot's encyclopedia, 1750, portrays Tamil as a syllabary, once
>again, unique representation among all Brahmi scripts.
My copy does no such thing. Plate XV shows Grantha with inherent
vowels and plate XX shows Tamil with inherent vowels. That it also
draws out the full set of letters with their vowel matras is a
presentation issue; in Plate XVII for Devanagari and in Plate XXI for
Thai, the letters and vowel matras are also shown. The use of the
word "syllabary" on that page does not signify that Tamil is not an
abugida (a term unknown to Diderot).
>Part of the confusion seems to come back to the fact that the pulli
>has been called "virama" in Unicode although they do not do the same
>thing. The similarity between Tamil and other Indic scripts has been
>vastly
>overemphasized.
I disagree. Saying so is just part of the tactic taken by those who
want to pretend that Tamil is less-Brahmic (and therefore more
unique) than it is.
All of these scripts are unique, in their own way, special, and
beautiful. No one disputes that. But Brahmic they all are.
>I understand the Tamil writing system to have an origin related to other
>Brahmi scripts.
I don't.
>However, it has been defined and represented over the millenia in
>its own terms, not just 'one of the Brahmi scripts.'
All of the scripts descended from Brahmi are "just another one of the
Brahmic scripts". They may all have unique features because they have
to represent different languages, but their structure is Brahmic.
Tamil is no exception.
>I hope this helps.
It is revisionist and not credible. It does not help us either
understand or implement Tamil.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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