Re: Unicode Bloopers

From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Apr 21 2005 - 18:55:59 CST

  • Next message: Arcane Jill: "Re: String name and Character Name"

    Andrew West wrote:
    >I have largely relied on the discussion that has
    >taken place on this list, so if I have got anything
    >wrong, or if you have any additions to
    >suggest, please let me know.

    > http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/Bloopers.html

    I have some suggestion regarding the comments
    related to the two Dravidian letters.

    (1) KANNADA LETTER FA:

    " Dravidian [l], " This can possibly be
    replaced by " Dravidian [l_with_an_underscore] ".
    Is this [l U+0332] ?

    Dravidian languages typically have 3 l's.
    [l_with_underscore] is the standard transliteration
    of this special Dravidian [l]. For example, see
    Library of Congress Tamil transliteration:
    http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/tamil.pdf

    (2) TAMIL SIGN VISARGA

    Aaytham is transliterated as
    "Dravidian [k_with_an_underscore]".
    (Perhaps this transcription can be added at some
    place in your comments.) Again, pl. refer to ALA-LC
    page tamil.pdf refered above.

    See Heike Boedeker's comments
    from the german book on Tamil grammar.
    ( Hermann Beythan, Praktische grammatik
    der tamilsprache in umschrift, 1943
    Leipzig, O. Harrassowitz) at:
    http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0008&L=indology&P=R11730

    Note again the connection between
    visarga and aaytham.

    aaytham, until quite recent times, occurs
    always word-medially. There are many ways
    of transliterating "f" into Tamil. Perhaps,
    3 decades old, in *some* (not all) news magazines,
    f = "aaytham" followed by "p". To accommodate
    this, Unicode Tamil chart does not show the
    old behaviour of dotted circle in visarga/aaytham
    any longer. So, a statement something like
    "Placing aaytham word-initially in Tamil is a modern
    innovation" can be added.

    Naga Ganesan
    Houston, TX



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Apr 21 2005 - 18:57:18 CST