From: Poopathi Manickam (poopathi@comcast.net)
Date: Sun May 01 2005 - 11:54:26 CDT
This is story to me..!
Care to explain a bit more about the letter-ஃ Tamil aay'dham
and its "alleged" derivation from the Sanskrit's aa'sritha..?
Btw.. As we all know..
In Tamil.. Aharam, Aa-haram. e-haram, ee-haaram, u-haram.. uu-haaram....
and it goes until Aaydham and it's very unique 'letter' (unlike 'visarga' )
and is pronounced slightly differently from Sanskrit.
Poopathi S. Manickam
----- Original Message -----
From: "N. Ganesan" <naa.ganesan@gmail.com>
To: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2005 6:54 AM
Subject: Unicode code points of Tamil Grantham conjunct SRI
> Unicode code points of Tamil Grantham conjunct SRI
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Some may recall in the list about the last month discussions on
> Visarga and Aaytham,
> the intricate relationship between them as recorded in scholarly
> publications,
> and even the word itself, aaytham deriving from a visarga term, aa'srita
> of Sanskrit, aaytham is quite different from aayutham 'weapon' etc.,
> Mentions and mails
> with unattested words like VisargaL etc., seem to have abated.
>
> -------
>
> Likewise, it was felt essential to tell about the basic Unicode code
> points of Sanskrit
> term, SRI as used in all of India, and its Tamil Grantham codepoints.
>
> The Unicode-accepted proposal on sha (U+0bb6) correctly
> identifies SRI as being <0BB6, 0BCD, 0BB0, 0BC0>. It mentions SRI
> ligature being made up of U+0bb6 prominently:
> http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2617.pdf
> Section 2.3 explicitly mentions the use of U+0bb8 in SRI ligature as
> *incorrect*.
>
> The review document with WG02 (Unicode) document
> number is n2618,
> http://wwwold.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n2618
> which talks about SRI and its component sha (0bb6).
> The WG02 document clearly specifies why
> sha (0bb6) is needed for Tamil:
> "ISCII included letters for {Ss}, {s}, {h}
> but left out the letter for {sh} in Tamil. This
> resulted in a major deficiency in the code
> - for instance, there is no way of representing
> the backing string of a very important 'akshara' in
> the language viz., {SRI}".
>
> I hear often that sometimes SRI is written
> differently. Yes, 100% agreed. Tamil nativizes the borrowed
> loan words and letters of Sanskrit Grantham letters,
> conjuncts differently. In fact, it is one yardstick
> used by linguistics specialists to show that
> a particular word is a borrowal in a language.
> Take the conjunct, kSha (Thank God, Unicode
> does not give it a separate code point unlike
> hacked encodings). kSha is tamilized in various
> ways: -kk-, -cc-, -Tc- and so on, with additinal
> operative rule that word initially, kSha- will
> become k-, or c-. Likewise, Sri ligature is tamilized
> in many ways: eg., tiru or cirii (long standing usage.
> See Azhvar paasuams) or something else.
> But these nativization attempts differ from
> person to person, time to time, district to district.
> In English script, SRI conjunct is written in mulptiple
> ways: sri, srii, sri_with_a_macron, s(acute)ri(macron),
> sree, shree. shrii, shri, ... As we know well, Tamil script
> also can do different attempts at nativization of the
> loan word, SRI from Sanskrit. Like cirii, cii (ciitaran,
> ciivalappEri, a town in Tinnevelly dist. a movie
> was ciivalappEri paaNDi. ciivalan < srivallabhan),
> siri, sirii, ... all these r can be replaced with R by some,
> also s(0bb6) can also be replaced with 0bb8, 0bb7 and so on.
> So many combinations and permutations, a bewildering array, is
> possible. These tamilizing attempts can be seen in nonconjunct
> and conjunct ksha also: -Tc-, -kk-, -cc-, with additional
> operative rule that word-initial consonants in Tamil
> words will be elided.
>
> I wrote a letter to Sri. Kalyan, (Project Madurai)
> explaining the need to use the
> correct code point for the Tamil
> Grantha ligature, SRI as
> <U+0BB6, U+0BCD, U+0BB0, U+0BC0> ,
> http://www.services.cnrs.fr/wws/arc/ctamil/2005-04/msg00034.html
> These code points and their equivalents
> are used not just in Tamil but through out
> India to produce the conjunct Shree
> (whatever the Indic script may be).
>
> Hence, *definition* of Sanskrit Grantham ligature:
> SRI = <0BB6, 0BCD, 0BB0, 0BC0>
> This is used all across India.
> Hence, my recommendation is to use this long standing
> usage in the future documents.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Naga Ganesan, Ph.D.
>
>
>
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