L2/16-035

To: Lisa Moore/Santa Teresa/IBM@IBMUS
From: Vasu Renganathan
Date: 01/21/2016 07:25PM
Subject: Re: Tamil Sign Nukta

Dear Dr. Lisa Moore,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I do understand the concern of Mr. Martin, but I don't think this would be the right way of doing it. Adding this sign as part of Tamil BMP will result more problem than any convenience it may have for the tribal languages that Mr. Martin is pointing out. As you know, this effort will end up having many unexpected consequences for Tamil and it will be a very serious issue as far as Tamil orthography is concerned. There have been many attempts already to make a reform for Tamil script for many reasons, including the ones to propose ways to represent voiced sounds in Tamil. This sign will surely be used to add with every voiceless stop consonants to represent the corresponding voiced sounds in Tamil. As a result, there will be certain section of people among the Tamils who will start using this sign to represent Tamil in a completely different way. Surely, this sort of attempts will cause immense amount of issues among the Tamils both for pedagogical reasons as well as others, including archival, commercial, and a number of other reasons.

I will work with the members of INFITT to submit a formal request to stop this sort of attempts, but please consider bringing this to the attention of the Tamil Nadu government as well before making any decision on this proposal.

Thanks,

Vasu Renganathan
INFITT's liaison for Unicode.