From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Jun 27 2005 - 06:58:03 CDT
Curtis Clark (jcclark-lists@earthlink.net) wrote:
On 2005-06-26 15:08, Richard Wordingham wrote:
>> Actually, Unicode has added such a character,
>>©¯ (U+014B), to the *script* used by the French
>>*language*. I don't know how often it appears in
>>French, but I have seen it in the spelling of
>>Bangladesh on a map apparently in English,
>> and it occasionally turns up in Indian names
>> and terms written in English.
>Another that came to mind is ¨ (thorn), "imposed"
>upon the Latin script from Runic, a separate
>alphabet, so that the Saxons could strengthen
>their hegemony by writing the sounds of their
>unmelodious language, sounds unneeded by French, >Spanish, or the
original Latin. We thought we
>had fought back their attack by omitting it from ASCII, >forcing them
to use the t-h digraph (and ambiguously,
>aha!, for it also is used for ©£), but our sweet victory
>was overturned by the foul potentates of Unicode
>and their Icelandic henchmen who forced, literally,
>a thorn into our side.
Closer to the home of Tamils, there are examples
of Unicode characters not used by the majority at all.
Take Devanagari script:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0900.pdf
U+090E, U+0912, U+0929, U+0931, U+0934, etc.,
etc., Devanagari even has a new sign called Nukta
to add new letters! So, to restrict Tamil *script* from
not having minority letters will be suicidal.
In Tamil code chart of Unicode, there is a wrong
annotation about anuswaram & needs to be out.
A sort of "m" and vocalic r (a sort of "ru") is
used in transliterating Sanskrit, Kannada, Malayalam, etc.,
into Tamil script. (BTW, the majority Tamil Grantha
script (which has to get its own code page for Sanskrit
books) letters of anusvara & vocalic r are little
different, not "m" & "ru").
N. Ganesan
PS:
Since Arabic is a widely used script in the Islamic
world, there must be some encoded characters
not used by majority or in particular region(s) & so on.
(BTW, Tamil language was written in Arabic script,
there were books printed in Arabi Tamil. I bet if we
research enough, to represent Tamil-specific characters,
some new characters were perhaps used).
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