From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Mon Sep 12 2005 - 13:54:27 CDT
If by Indic unicode means Indo-European, is it a political agenda in part of 
Unicode not to name it Indo-European and conceal the facts by calling Indic?
No Indic means Indian language and Indo-European means Indo-European. That 
is what Unicode means.
Sinnathurai Srivas
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
To: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2005 11:26 AM
Subject: Tamil Non-Tamil 2-Dot Visarga
> Is there any reason for not adding what appears to be a 2-dot visarga to 
> the Tamil script?  While, FWIW, I have no evidence that it occurs in 
> Tamil, it frequently occurs in Sanskrit and Saurashtra texts written in 
> the Tamil scripts.  There are three issues that I can see:
>
> 1) It seems that some writers simply use the similar looking colon 
> (U+003A). I believe it is regarded as bad practice to use this sort of 
> punctuation as a letter.  The 2-dot visarga occurs word-internally in 
> Saurashtra.
>
> 2) It might possibly be a glyph variant of aytham.  That seems unlikely - 
> has anyone examples of them both appearing, ideally in the same font, in 
> text that is a mixture of the Sanskrit and Tamil languages or the 
> Saurashtra and Tamil languages?
>
> 3) Spoofing and IDN.  ASCII colon and the Tamil-script 2-dot visarga are 
> very similar.  However, would a colon be allowed inside a Tamil script 
> name?
>
> The description of the character should probably say something like 
> 'Sanskrit, Saurashtra, not Tamil'.  I'd prefer something stronger, like 
> 'Indic languages, not Dravidian', but:
> (a) I'm not sure it's actually true.
> (b) Many people don't know the use of 'Indic' to refer to a family of 
> Indo-European languages, and using it would be as confusing to some as the 
> true statement, 'Strine is not an Australian language'.  ('Strine' = 
> English as spoken in Australia; 'Australian' = to do with the Australian 
> language phylum.)
>
> Richard.
>
>
>
> 
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