L2/05-310 Source: R. Chitrajakumar Date: 2005-10-24 Subject: Rachana Documents Organization: Rachana Akshara Vedi Dear Sir, Subject: Chillu encoding debate in Malayalam Unicode For the August session of the UTC, we had submitted a detailed document regarding the Malayalam chillu and encoding of chillu in Malayalam Unicode. On the basis of the document, the UTC had rescinded approval for chillu characters. After this decision, the entire matter came into the mailing list and so much mail was exchanged. In fact, some 4 or 5 persons participated in this, but the bulk of the email was from a couple of them. We always did and still do maintain to the UTC that we are eagerly awaiting vital criticism and non-prejudicial discourse about our views from the scholarly public. This is because it is our organization's ideology that our own stand must be modified through such discussions. But unfortunately, the said 1 or 2 persons sending the bulk of the email, did not offer any substantial arguments, neither regarding our document nor any realistic assessment of Malayalam language, choosing instead to misinterpret and confuse some of our broad statements. We went through their arguments and documents and they seem to spend more effort to abuse our document without providing any basis. They merely state that whatever we have said is "not True" or "not Correct" without offering substantial arguments, understanding what we have really said. Even though the situation is such, we have taken up two missions: 1) we have some additional things to say regarding the chillu encoding and Malayalam and we have prepared a document towards this 2) we would like to remove some of the misunderstandings created by these persons Another instance in this regard is the intervention of some persons creating an impression that the chillu encoding is a governmental view. Such a letter with a bureaucratic outlook such as prescribing the time-frame for criticism for chillu encoding, etc.: http://www.cdactvm.in/chillu.pdf The so-called report mentioned by such persons (http://keralaitmission.org/web/main/Default.asp?action=0&what=100047) is identified in Kerala by scholars as being a bundle of mistakes and exposes the basic misunderstanding regarding the Unicode principles and standards. Since it is irrelevant here, we will not go into it, but we are always prepared to give a detailed analysis of that report. Only after the present decision of the UTC to rescind the chillu encoding, some govt people and officials realized that their earlier report was in error, and that it should be reconsidered. There came a big confusion and criticism among the scholars of Kerala, of this report. A notable event that occurred was that the Director of Kerala IT Mission informed us that they are to reconsider the entire proposal, and he invited our participation. At the very same time, he also sent an intimation to UTC seeking that our arguments be discarded and that chillus must be encoded since it is a governmental view. We have submitted his invitation before the General Council of Rachana Akshara Vedi, and the Council observed that the said report is full of errors and misunderstandings about language computing and Unicode technology, and no conclusions can be reached from it. It was also decided that, at this juncture, in order to safeguard the Malayalam language, the General Secretary is to submit the arguments and findings directly to the Unicode Technical Committee, since they are the final authority to evaluate the sanctity and weight of the arguments. It was also decided to inform the Director of Kerala State IT Mission of the same. Another fantastic event is that what started with the chillu encoding, has now gone to encoding of many other Malayalam glyphs, such as C2-conjoining forms, etc. This is dealt with in detail in our document. From your reply to a query, we are very happy to note that UTC takes decision after weighing the merits of the discussion. The UTC is well aware that Rachana Akshara Vedi has taken a huge effort and time to go through Unicode standards in general, the technical aspects like ZWJ/ZWNJ etc, embedding of Malayalam in particular and Indic in general within the Unicode framework. It also took a very high effort to apply the inner logic of Malayalam script and its grammar, relevant to the Unicode encoding. The reason why we have undertaken such a laborious job is so that - 1) UTC will acknowledge the academic effort we have taken. 2) UTC will only consider the logical content and merit of arguments, and not the agency behind it, whether it is governmental/expert committee, or something else. 3) to fulfill our intense desire for a logical embedding of Malayalam in Unicode. In this context, Rachana Akshara Vedi invites UTCs kind attention to identify statements and conclusions rendered or likely to be rendered that "chillu should be encoded", "this is a governmental view", "it is the view of an expert committee", "it is the view of the IT department", etc, without any arguments whatsoever to substantiate them. In conclusion, we wish to say that the chillu encoding will cause problems in Malayalam computing at different levels of computing application. By doing it this way, it will turn out to be the most damaging event for Malayalam language and Malayalam computing, since unlike other languages we have just begun to enter the arena of computing. In this context, we submit the following documents to UTC: - Problems of Malayalam Encoding in the Indic Context (L2/05-308) - ZWJ/ZWNJ (L2/05-307) - Proposal form for four additional Malayalam codepoints (L2/05-309) Kindly place it for UTC consideration at the next meeting. R. Chitrajakumar General Secretary Rachana Akshara Vedi