From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Mar 19 2006 - 06:50:27 CST
We'd like to know the name of the Punjabi unicode font shipped
with Windows XP machines.
The reason is that there were newspapers
in 20th century that had the Tamil abugidas
with u & uu vowel modifiers split up.
We have to record that fact in the Unicode
Standard. That way we can produce those
newspaper material in the web. Also, like
Malayalam, the separated u/uu abugidas
in Tamil enables much ease of learning.
With growth of English and globalisation,
Tamil becomes a secondary language/script
in many Indian homes not to speak of the
diaspora worldwide. The much simplifictaion
of u/uu alphasyllabaries of Tamil helps
to a greater extent the adult literacy
programs (teaching Tamil script in evening
classes for blue collar workers in poor
neighborhoods of India's cities). It's proven research
that children and adults often forget what
they were taught about u/uu abugida ligatures,
if there is a gap of few months.
So, recording the broken u/uu 'uyirmey'
in TUS will help Tamil as in Malayalam script.
Malayalam and Tamil scripts reinforce each other
with interactions (you can see that in 3 part
vowel modifier signs & so on. I wrote a proposal
to add symbols for 10, 100 & 1000 in Malayalam
which corr. to Tamil code-points which was
accepted already.) In Tamil unicode googlegroups,
people recommend their choices of the u/uu
separate-glyph. One such is U+0A39 and U+0A30.
Here is full Tirukkural, a holy book of Tamils,
http://groups.google.com/group/orungkuRi/msg/cdb21a9a81819a7c
http://groups.google.com/group/orungkuRi/msg/afa83bb073ced139
http://groups.google.com/group/orungkuRi/msg/f38026a99a07abf6
A praise for unicode in kuRaLveNpaa metrics:
மலரினਹம் மெல்லிதਹ யਰனிகோட் சீலர்அதன்
செவ்வி தலைப்படਹ வார்.
Some people ask us why is U+0A39 and U+0A30
visible even without installing Arial Unicode MS
or James' Code2000 etc., My guess is they
(Ie., WinXP systems) have already a Punjabi font.
What is that Punjabi font?
Thanks,
N. Ganesan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Mar 19 2006 - 06:51:53 CST