Re: Tamil Non-Tamil 2-Dot Visarga

From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Mon Sep 12 2005 - 17:02:56 CDT

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    ndlogasundaram wrote on Monday, September 12, 2005 at 6:50 PM:

    >> Is there any reason for not adding what appears to be a 2-dot visarga to
    > the
    >> Tamil script?

    > In the orthodox Tamil, as taught and learnt in the native user's land, there
    > is no such letter named as 'visarga'. But it has a letter taught as 'Aytham'
    > which is never referred by the word 'visarga' Only in Unicode they are
    > referring 'Aytham' by a non-Tamil word 'visarga'.
    >
    > There is a clear glyph difference between Tamil Aytham which is with three
    > dots in triangular formation (pyramid) while the devanagari visarga have only
    > two dots i.e.one vertically above the other nearly same as the punctuation
    > mark - semi colon

    I said I had seen it used in Sanskrit and Saurashtra, not in Tamil.

    > When there is no such letter as two dot visarga in Tamil, if any one uses it
    > for any semantics in Tamil it may be in his/her own personnel whims and may
    > be treated as a bad practice. If the letter in use is Tamil 'Aytham' then
    > they would have marked by a three dot glyph for canonical correctness.

    What letter should one use for visarga when composing Sanskrit in the Tamil script? (In the 'Latin' script we use h with a dot below.) The use in Sanskrit is not a personal whim, but a fairly common practice, along with numbers to make up for the Grantha letters excluded as being too alien to Tamil. Its usage when writing Saurashtra is similar in some respects to the usage of aytham - see the examples in the proposal for the Saurashtra script - http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2969.pdf .

    > ( kæcu is an antique coin of smaller denomination. It was else where shown as
    > a link with the word 'cash')

    Is this word transliterated as kāsu and derived from Sanskrit karṣa, and as a weight equal to one four hundredth of a tula? How is the Tamil word spelt?

    Richard.



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