Re: Tamil Non-Tamil 2-Dot Visarga

From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Mon Sep 12 2005 - 14:03:34 CDT

  • Next message: Richard Wordingham: "Re: Tamil Non-Tamil 2-Dot Visarga"

    Tamil script follows a well defined Grammar, unlike Unicode understands
    other languages.
    It is based on scientific judgement and is the ancient Grammar probably of
    all Grammars.

    I do not think Unicode understands Tamil Grammar in full and hence it should
    not be changed by Unicode enthusiasts.

    Sanskrit can have it's own space. Why UC should meddle with Tamil to promote
    Sanskrit. Even worse is that Sanskrit is not a language used at home of the
    billion people that it suppose to have a tie with. If enthusiasts want to
    have fun with Sanskrit they should be given code points for that purpose and
    not meddle with Tamil or other real languages.

    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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