Re: Tamil Collation vs Transliteration/Transcription Encoding

From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Sun Jun 26 2005 - 15:02:47 CDT

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    N. Ganesan wrote:

    >This fact is recorded in the Tamil chapter of the Unicode standard also.
    >The unicode std.
    mentions using 2,3,4 as subscripts on the Tamil letters (k, c, T, t, p in
    transliteration).
    There are hundreds of books existing using 2,3,4 as subscripts or
    superscripts upon
    க், ச், ட், த், ப் (= k, c, T, t, p respectively in transliteration) to
    transliterate voiced and aspirated letters
    (called varga letters of k, c, T, t, p) on Indic scripts into Tamil.

    How are they combined with the vowel? Is it C + V + subscript/superscript
    digit in Unicode?

    > Of course, in Tamil Grantha script to write Sanskrit texts, the "varga"
    > letters are independently
    defined, and they also conjugate heavily. The main difference between the
    two Southern scripts
    is the language it uses, the sort order and the nature of conjuncts in each.

    * APOPLEXY ALERT *
    Would a font for Tamil Grantha and Tamil language Tamil script have the same
    glyphs for the letters and vowels in both the Tamil language Tamil script
    and Tamil Granta script? From your description, it sounds as though the
    Tamil script block in Unicode should be infilled to encompass it, but then
    disabling conjunct formation in the Tamil language would be tricky,
    especially in plain text on Windows. Maybe one would have to add a
    character to enable conjunct formation instead of using VIRAMA!

    Richard.



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