From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Sun Jun 26 2005 - 15:05:54 CDT
More than anything, it is a gradual attempt to make the last remaining
Indian language Sanskritised without sound technical reasons. I do not think
it is the duty of Unicode to be part of this extra ordinary plot. You can
see that all other Indic languages are already converted.
English is the worlds advanced language at the moment. ask those wish to
deprecate Tamil, if they would be interested in giving up Indic for English.
The out cry will be forceful. It is because Tamil has no defence, no
Government, being subordinate citizens, unable to stop this kinds of attack.
It is not Unicode's duty to destroy Tamil.
It has the worlds earliest written, highly sophisticated Grammar.
Sanskrit evolved half from Tamil and now in the form of Indic want to
destroy it through Unicode. All those struggles of Tamils over some hundreds
of years is being dismantled by Unicode. This must stop.
Srivas
----- Original Message -----
From: "Asmus Freytag" <asmusf@ix.netcom.com>
To: "N. Ganesan" <naa.ganesan@gmail.com>; "Unicode List"
<unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 6:56 PM
Subject: Re: Tamil sha (U+0BB6) - deprecate it?
> At 06:55 AM 6/26/2005, N. Ganesan wrote:
>>Srivas mentions in his mails about
>>deprecating SHA (U+0BB6).
>>This cannot be done as there are some users
>>who want to transliterate Sanskrit words
>>one-to-one need sha letter.
>>
>>Wrote this in the INFITT WG on Unicode:
>>--------------
>>Deprecation of U+0BB6 cannot be done because:
>>a) Unicode stability policy prohibits moving or removing
>>an encoded letter. If some user does not want it, that's fine.
>
> If U+0BB6 is in active use, then there's no reason to deprecate it.
>
> However, I wanted to make a point about what "deprecation" means
> in the context of the Unicode Standard. It is correct that characters
> do not get removed. However, in certain circumstances, their use
> can be officially discouraged - usually because a better alternative
> is available.
>
> There are several levels. At the most informal, the standard
> might simply point out a preferred alternative. At the most formal,
> the character is given the 'deprecated' status.
>
> A deprecated character is retained in the standard, and conformant
> implementations can still support it (and in fact are encouraged
> to treat it differently from a mere unassigned code point).
> However, spell-checkers and similar applications are encouraged
> to flag the use of a deprecated character, so that the user
> can replace it by a different character.
>
> In other words, a deprecated character is a character that's
> retained in the standard, in case some documents exist that
> use it, but there is no reason for current users or new
> documents to ever employ it.
>
> This is different from a special use character. For example,
> several characters in the Greek block are intended only for
> technical and scientific use. In ordinary Greek text, they
> should not be used, even though their form matches that of
> some ordinary characters (in some fonts).
>
> Such characters would be discouraged for use in ordinary
> text, but they would never be deprecated. Spell checkers
> and similar programs are encouraged to flag their use as
> an error, if it occurs in the middle of Greek words.
>
> It might be the case that U+0BB6 is such a special use
> character - used in some specific context, but discouraged
> for ordinary text.
>
> A./
>
>>b) U+0BB6 is very much needed for one-to-one transliteration
>>between Indic scripts including Tamil. (This is the main
>>reason I was enthusiastic about 0bb6 getting into Tamil
>>code chart)
>>c) Sri conjunct, a Sanskrit loan word in Tamil, is defined
>>using 0bb6 and its equivalent in all Indian languages.
>>(Yes, there could be approximating transcriptions,
>>but SRI's exact transliteration needs 0bb6).
>>
>>Naga Ganesan
>
>
>
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