Re: Tamil 0B83: Tamil Aytham and Devanagari VisargaL

From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 16:17:06 CST

  • Next message: Sinnathurai Srivas: "Re: Tamil 0B83: Tamil Aytham and Devanagari VisargaL"

    On Apr 1, 2005, at 2:45 PM, Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:

    > It calls Aytham as VisargaL.
    >

    Well, the charts actually say U+0B83 is called TAMIL SIGN VISARGA
    with a notation "= aytham".

    It may be appropriate to make this clearer to casual users, but
    again, Unicode character names are not intended to be descriptive.
    They are intended to be unique. Considerable effort has gone into
    making them descriptive, but mistakes have been made which cannot now
    be fixed. U+0B83 is not the only character to thus suffer.

    > It is wrong. It is technically wrong. It does not do what Visarga
    > migt do! It is not Visarga. It breaks Unicode implementations,
    > because of it's untru descriptive name.

    Anyone who implements Unicode based on the names of characters is not
    implementing the standard correctly. Again, U+0B83 is not unique in
    this regard. Unicode is more than a collection of glyphs in charts
    or names of characters.

    > It is an insult to a suffering minority language.
    >

    It is certainly not intended as an insult, any more than the
    standard's failure to encode "ff" and "ll" as separate characters is
    intended as an insult to Welsh. The insult would rather lie with
    those who don't care enough about Tamil to learn how to implement it
    properly in Unicode.

    I realize that this is an issue about which you care passionately,
    and your passionate devotion to the correct implementation of Tamil
    does you credit. But please understand that character renaming
    simply is not an option at this point in the standard's history. If
    you wish to provide constructive suggestions, then among the things
    which *can* be done are:

    1) Additional annotations to the name

    2) Additions to the FAQ

    3) Additions to the standard's text on implementing Tamil

    ========
    John H. Jenkins
    jenkins@apple.com
    jhjenkins@mac.com
    http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/



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