From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Sun Jun 26 2005 - 18:56:57 CDT
An exasperated Michael Everson wrote in response to Sinnathurai Srivas
:
>>More than Sanskrit English is the extremely important to be
>>transliterated in Tamil. This can be done by using Tamil system.
>Agreed.
>>Sanskrit is always seen a wanton intrusion to destroy all Indic
>>languages and cause confusion.
This is untrue.
>>Tamil has been defending it self for hundreds of years. Tamil has
>>it's own system and a sophisticated system.
>Tamil is not all that different from any of the other Brahmic scripts we
>have encoded. The Unicode encoding of Tamil is adequate for the
>representation of Tamil text.
>>Unicode is not the entity that should decide the demise of the
>>ancient and sophisticated Tamil, like the demise of all other Indic
>>languages.
>This is utter nonsense. Unicode supports Tamil and most of the other
>scripts of India.
>>Sanskrit is not Tamil, though Sanskrit borrows vast amount of
>>technology and vocabulary from Tamil. Let's Tamil follow it's own
>>ways.
>Sanskrit borrows very little terminology from any language. All of the
>languages of India, including Tamil. borrow terminology from Sanskrit,
>however.
There has been a movement amongst Tamils, the Pure Tamil Movement, to rid
Tamil of Sanskrit loanwords. It's by no means a unique phenomenon - German
deliberately eliminated a lot of vocabulary of French origin, and in the
20th Century Turkish deliberately eliminated a lot of Arabic words and
expressions. There are some vitriolically anti-Sanskrit sentiments around
in India - you'd find a fine collection if you googled for Sanskrit at the
site www.dalitstan.org .
There is actually quite a bit of foreign terminology in Sanskrit. Some of
it is 'hypersanskritised' to hide its foreign origin.
Richard.
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