Re: Tamil Text Messaging in Mobile Phones

From: Sinnathurai Srivas (avarangal@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jul 28 2002 - 12:22:09 EDT


To all,

There were many mails at this Unicode forum.
I still have to read some of them.

Please study carefully the following before analising anything further.

1/ I'm not asking Tamil Script reform to be approved by Unicode.
This will be done by Tami Nadu Government and other countries with Tamil
speaking population. IFITT, Tamil_Reasearch and other relevant worldwide
Institutions will make sure that this is done in an appropriate way.

2/ I'm informing Tamil Script reform is imminent. May be Win X5P be the time
to upadte and do business.

3/ Other systems with low resolution and limited bandwidth can immediately
use reformed characters. For a Tamil spending half an hour will make sure
that one can understand reformed Tamil. Hence, say instead of thousand of
codes being transmitted for text messaging a picture of say "b" all you need
is to send one code for the character "b". (consider the cost of bandwidth
for sendin a picture and sending a code for a character.) It is not possible
for all languages be rendered within the mobile phone itself, unless u store
millions of MIBs within the mobile phones. Hence, Tamil will take the
character transmission route and some languages may take picture
transmission route.)

4/ Tamil is already in use in computers with 8bit encoding/s.
Here we have Tamil and English used in parallel and nothing else.
This maens the non-linear Tamil is also working perfectly in 8bit mode in
parallel with English. Hence, yes, we are looking to Unicode to do
everything including Multilingual, low resolution and low bandwidth.

5/ I proposed the Linaer Tamil coding long before Unicode was in existence.
Then I was structuring the language for Voice Recognition, which I do not
persue as a hobby any more. I got stuck in reform at present. You can refer
to my earlier fonts that existed before TAB and TSC codings.
The name Linaer "Linear Tamil Unicode" was mentioned to me by James Kass,
while discussing about Unicode.

6/ Luckily Unicode has ALREADY structured the coding in Linear Fashion.
This means script reform for Tamil is ALREADY COMPLETED within Unicode.
All we have to do is schedule the withering of various complex rendering.

7/ Original Tamil, even in BC3 was written in Linear fashion. The complex
and fancy full (I call it uninteligent) changes to Tamil writing was
introduced in the recent past.
We are devicing a way to go back to the old scientific Tamil writing system,
which is correct and sensible.

8/ About inherent a and diacritics
Inherent a and diacritics will need to be coded by Unicode. This will be
requested officially at the appropriate time. The diacritics are for use in
Pronounciation dictionary. (Example 18 consonants represents about 56
phonemes of consonants, similarly about 5 Vowels represent minimum of (not
including long vowels) 10 phonemes, but in minute details about 25 Vowel
phonemes.

Inherent a: As u know there should be 5 vowels. (In English it is 4
excluding the ai=i). Inherent a is supposed to be kept in mind (not written)
while reading. This is ok when combining with consonants. But we have
problem analising and explaining words when inherent a vowel combies with
other vowels.

eg, Iyalphu = Ialphu
we write it as Iyalphu but converse as Ialphu. There are numerous words in
this format. We treat Y and V as having properties not only of consonant,
but also of a kind of Vowel properties. ( I call it the duality of Y and V).
We need to write about, talk about such, ... this phenominan and we need
inherent a to be coded for this and other purposes. In 10 years time we may
decide to do away with the principle of inherent and use a wriiten form in
real term, etc.. reasons.

Regards
Sinnathurai Srivas

_________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos:
http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun Jul 28 2002 - 10:48:59 EDT