From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sun Apr 03 2005 - 05:35:44 CST
At 10:28 +0100 2005-04-03, Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:
>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.
My opinion on this matter is based on the known history of Brahmic writing.
>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.
The Tamil script did not predate Tamil Grantha.
>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.
The Brahmic scripts do not derive from the Indus script, if this is
what you mean by Harappan.
>There came a system Alphabet based PHONEMIC. 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".
This is anachronistic invention on your part.
>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 ).
Apparently this is some sort of proposal for Tamil script reform. The
use of the cedilla with Tamil letters is rather disturbing.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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