From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 13 2007 - 10:21:45 CDT
I can follow your line of thought.
However, in Tamil, the only one letter, x, is treated as consonant/conjunct
ksh by Unicode causes unnecessary and immence pain for lingual programming.
Yet, the Grammar explicitly avoids conjuncts, while Unicode explicitly
allocates conjunct to Tamil.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Maxwell" <mmaxwell@casl.umd.edu>
To: <indic@unicode.org>; "Unicode Mailing List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Cc: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@google.com>; "Michael Maxwell"
<mmaxwell@casl.umd.edu>
Sent: 13 August 2007 15:33
Subject: RE: Feedback on PR-104
> [Apologies if this should not go to both the Indic and the Unicode mailing
> lists--I'm using the original cc list, but let me know if this is
> inappropriate!]
>
> Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:
>> Tamil already defines NEAR-VOICELESS VOWELS, which
>> CONTRADICTS the conjunct theory. With a sopisticated speech
>> spectrum analiser, this Grammar can be proved as valid.
>
> I don't understand why this is relevant. Unicode is about written
> scripts, not about pronunciation. There are dialects of Spanish that have
> voiceless vowels, or perhaps you'd call them near-voiceless. (For any
> linguists here, devoicing of vowels in e.g. Ecuadorian Sierra Spanish
> occurs between voiceless consonants, particularly if the vowel is
> unstressed. E.g. the second /e/ in necesario "necessary".) Spanish is
> written the same regardless of whether the vowels are voiced, and indeed,
> would be written if (as I suspect) the voiceless vowel is sometimes
> omitted entirely. The rule in question is purely allophonic, and does not
> cause a spelling issue for Spanish, much less an encoding issue.
>
> My suspicion is that any voiceless or semi-voiced vowels in Tamil,
> particularly these (which I would guess to be epenthetic) are purely
> allophonic, and are not reflected in written Tamil. The issue of whether
> the consonants in question are written as conjuncts or not is therefore
> surely orthogonal to the phonetics of the issue. Putting it differently,
> the writing system of Tamil is what it is, regardless of the detailed
> phonetics, or even the 'phonemics'.
>
> Mike Maxwell
> CASL/ U Md
>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Aug 13 2007 - 10:24:20 CDT