From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 17:14:46 CST
On 01/04/2005 23:01, Michael Everson wrote:
> ...
>
>> It is an insult to a suffering minority language.
>
>
> No, it isn't. And Tamil is not a minority language. It has 74,000,000
> speakers, according to the Ethnologue. Hungarian, by comparison, has
> 14,500.000 speakers.
>
The term "minority" is a relative one: the smaller of two groups
constituting a whole, or a group with a lower political status than
another group. See for example http://www.answers.com/minority&r=67
Although there are a large number of Tamil speakers, it is actually a
rather small minority language in both of the countries in which it is
widely spoken: 62 million speakers out of over a billion population in
India, 3 million out of 18 million in Sri Lanka. And the Tamil minority
in Sri Lanka has certainly been suffering at the hands of the Sinhalese
majority - not to mention the serious suffering from the tsunami in
Tamil regions of both countries.
I'm sure a deliberate insult to the Tamil people was not intended by
those who originally gave this incorrect character name. But please
don't follow up that unintentional offence by now deliberately insulting
the Tamil people and their language.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.9.0 - Release Date: 31/03/2005
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