From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Sun Apr 03 2005 - 02:51:26 CST
My technical answers will be sent in reply to original subject tag.
This is to discuss the historicity of Aytham. Your openion on this matter
sounds speculative.
Tamil and Sinthu (Sindu) writing system had very close relationship in
ancient Indian history. No such things as Grantha nor Sanskrit existed at
that time.
Sindu has it's histric evidence to show that Phonemic and Graphemic hybrids
were the system of that time. You can trace the traces of charactershapes of
Indic languages to Sindu/Harapa times.
There came a system Alphabet based Graphemic. That was Tamil.
The new arrival Grantha insisted on moving from Alphabet based Phonemic to
Phonemic only system. This is the results of present day descrepencies. This
happened to Aytham too. Tamil kept the simple and sophisticated Aytham.
Grantha moved on with complicated and possibly sophisticated "all of them".
As for consonants and vowels, Grantha misses many phonemes in everyday use,
but gives great emphasis for the selected phonemes while Tamil has vast pool
of Phonemes in everyday use with minimal alphabet based on phonemes. (See an
example http://www.geocities.com/avarangal/ch-isai.pdf ).
Sinnathurai
>It is chicken or egg.
It is phonemis only or phonemic based.
>>
Tamil Grantha had a visarga with two circles. Visarga represents a
kind of aspiration. Tamil innovated a three circled Aytham from this,
as is obvious from both its shape and its usage. That it is not used
identically to original visarga is due to the fact that the character
was being used in new ways. Yes, this is part of the genius of the
people who developed the early Tamil script from its Tamil Grantha
predecessor.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
To: "Unicode Discussion" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2005 12:23 AM
Subject: Re: Tamil 0B83: Tamil Aytham and Devanagari VisargaL
> At 23:31 +0100 2005-04-01, Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:
>
>>>No, it is not. It is a unique string of characters that identifies that
>>>code position.
>>
>>Yes it is technically wrong and misleads developers.
>
> Saying so does not make an argument about either technical error or
> development problems.
>
>>>No, it isn't. Though it is probably derived from the Tamil Grantha
>>>visarga.
>>
>>It is chicken or egg.
>>It is phonemis only or phonemic based.
>
> Tamil Grantha had a visarga with two circles. Visarga represents a kind of
> aspiration. Tamil innovated a three circled Aytham from this, as is
> obvious from both its shape and its usage. That it is not used identically
> to original visarga is due to the fact that the character was being used
> in new ways. Yes, this is part of the genius of the people who developed
> the early Tamil script from its Tamil Grantha predecessor.
>
> This also makes clear why the "false identification" of Aytham with
> Visarga was made, years ago. As has been pointed out to you, the
> appropriate data files have been changed so that the behaviour of the
> character is as you expect it.
>
> The name cannot be changed.
>
> No matter what you say, the name cannot be changed.
>
> No matter how right you may be, the name cannot be changed.
>
>>I think you understand minorty as something else. I mean, people without
>>power to rule themself with dignity. ruled by others is minority to me.
>>Constantly under legitrative threats and actions to impose others will
>>onto minorities as minority.
>
> The Universal Character Set allows Tamil people to process and interchange
> data in their language. Nothing could be more respectful and supportive of
> Tamil culture.
>
> You are "insulted" and "wounded" by something which has no significance,
> and which cannot be changed. Please get over your difficulty. If you
> don't, you will just suffer needlessly.
> --
> Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
>
>
>
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