From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 12 2005 - 12:54:12 CST
In this thread, I wish that more than Tamil,
Kannada script should get mentioned. Among the
Dravidian scripts, one Kannada character
is completely misnamed. U+0CDE has nothing
to do with "f" or "fa". U+0CDE is exactly same
as Tamil U+0BB4 and Malayalam U+0D34. Luckily, there is
now annotation announcing the mistake done about
Kannada LLLA. Similarly, hopefully Malayalam digit
zero glyph gets to be corrected to 0.
But I am not even sure whether Tamil aaytham
being named as Tamil visarga is a mistake.
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2005-m04/0250.html
Years ago, i recall mentioning to S. Srivas
in the Infitt working group list on unicode that
aaytham does not mean "weapon".
Though commonly perceived by Tamils as weapon,
the assumption that aaytham is related to sanskrit word,
aayudha 'weapon' is not held upon scrutiny. Aaytham is
a tamilized form of aa'srita (Sanskrit word)
which is a class of visarga. How do we know this?
In its earliest attestations in epigraphy (8th and
9th centuries) aaytham looks like the mathematical
"division" sign. This "division" sign (= aaytham)
is a visarga of special type. See Michael Everson's
proposal on Vedic accents,
http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/vedic/vedic-accents.pdf
The "division" sign is "0501 (div.sign) VISARGA ONE"
N. Ganesan
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