Re: Tamil Non-Tamil 2-Dot Visarga

From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Mon Sep 12 2005 - 13:54:27 CDT

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    If by Indic unicode means Indo-European, is it a political agenda in part of
    Unicode not to name it Indo-European and conceal the facts by calling Indic?

    No Indic means Indian language and Indo-European means Indo-European. That
    is what Unicode means.

    Sinnathurai Srivas

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
    To: <unicode@unicode.org>
    Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2005 11:26 AM
    Subject: Tamil Non-Tamil 2-Dot Visarga

    > Is there any reason for not adding what appears to be a 2-dot visarga to
    > the Tamil script? While, FWIW, I have no evidence that it occurs in
    > Tamil, it frequently occurs in Sanskrit and Saurashtra texts written in
    > the Tamil scripts. There are three issues that I can see:
    >
    > 1) It seems that some writers simply use the similar looking colon
    > (U+003A). I believe it is regarded as bad practice to use this sort of
    > punctuation as a letter. The 2-dot visarga occurs word-internally in
    > Saurashtra.
    >
    > 2) It might possibly be a glyph variant of aytham. That seems unlikely -
    > has anyone examples of them both appearing, ideally in the same font, in
    > text that is a mixture of the Sanskrit and Tamil languages or the
    > Saurashtra and Tamil languages?
    >
    > 3) Spoofing and IDN. ASCII colon and the Tamil-script 2-dot visarga are
    > very similar. However, would a colon be allowed inside a Tamil script
    > name?
    >
    > The description of the character should probably say something like
    > 'Sanskrit, Saurashtra, not Tamil'. I'd prefer something stronger, like
    > 'Indic languages, not Dravidian', but:
    > (a) I'm not sure it's actually true.
    > (b) Many people don't know the use of 'Indic' to refer to a family of
    > Indo-European languages, and using it would be as confusing to some as the
    > true statement, 'Strine is not an Australian language'. ('Strine' =
    > English as spoken in Australia; 'Australian' = to do with the Australian
    > language phylum.)
    >
    > Richard.
    >
    >
    >
    >



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