From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Mon Jun 27 2005 - 16:00:20 CDT
Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:
> Encoding Grantham or sanskrit is not a problem. Encoding transliteration
> is not a problem. The problem is encoding some thing as Tamil, or in
> code space reserved for tamil is the problem. It legitimises foreign
> languages as part of tamil. we love all languages, but we do not want
> other languages to change ours. We have a long history of resisting.
> This attept by Unicode is going to be the toughest one and Tamil would
> provbably loose and the die. Unicode will have such power in the future.
I think you are asking that the Tamil *script* block in Unicode should be reserved for
characters used for the Tamil *language*. This would formalise a relationship of
script-to-language for Tamil that exists for no other script in Unicode. Unicode encodes
characters in script blocks, not language blocks. Many scripts gain new characters over
time, as they are used to write languages, or even just loan words, other than the ones
for which they were originally devised. This is one of the norms of historical script
development. If, historically, some users of the Tamil script have added characters to it
to write Sanskrit words, one can expect those characters to be encoded in the Tamil script
Unicode range. Only a tiny percentage of the characters encoded in the various Latin
script blocks were ever used to write the Latin language. So what? They are needed for
other languages for which the script is used.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: Truth and tolerance, by Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger as was An autobiography from the Jesuit underground, by William Weston SJ War (revised edition), by Gwynne Dyer
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