The technical merits is swamped by political merits. Unicode is either blind or do not care.
when there are different philosopical paths, UC should respect and provide for that. so mixing two systems is not the duty of UC. Because one side is numerically powerfull, thoguh thaey may be technically worng, the UC tend to side with the powerful. That is wrong, especially when saving the last surviving ancient scientific system is the duty of UC, not hell bent on destroying it. Now the technical reasoning, It is the speech organs that produce speech and Tamil represents it. The scalability of this system is very high, (though not to the scale of a humanoid making up additional speech organs.) Representing just the sounds is like picking some of the sounds that the humans use (not all), and ristricting the human speech. That is the difference. i can quote rules in tamil grammar that analyses the generation of speech and it's scalability. The problem is that already mostly all languages has lost that basic philosophy. By mixing (kind of canonical) and creating partial-duplicates into an alphabet system is a recipie for distruction of the surving scientific system, due to the popularity and numerical power of that alternative philosophy. mixing will definitly destroy the system eventually, because this has now turned out to be the case with some of the other languages. i hope UC does not by insistence, do not lead to the destruction of the last surviving system. Even before Unicode, there have been attempts to eliminate such system, mainly for political reasons and also by lack of understanding by some of this system. There are technical reasons and heritage reasons why Tamil writing system should be preserved. There is only political reason this sytem is under attack. Is UC going to hide behind we are just providing computing facility and forget all else? Sinnathurai --- On Thu, 25/11/10, John Hudson <[email protected]> wrote: From: John Hudson <[email protected]> Subject: [indic] Re: Revisit Tamil sRi definition in Unicode. To: Cc: [email protected] Date: Thursday, 25 November, 2010, 23:21 Sinnathurai Srivas wrote: > This is the problem we have with UC and the major > corporates, they are trying to destroy the only serviving writing > system, the only scientific writing system, the only original > writing system of the world. No, they are trying to provide a computer encoding of a set of signs such that these can be used in computer text processing environments and around which secondary mechanisms such as fonts can be built. As has been fairly frequently discussed in the past with regard to other writing systems, there is no requirement for a computer encoding scheme to directly model any particular understanding of how a particular writing system works. Which is just as well, since historically different communities may have had different understanding of the same set of characters and, indeed, may have used them in different ways. The issues that matter with regard to a computer encoding are technical issues, not cultural or philosophical issues. So, for instance, when N. Ganesan points out that there are differences in processing behaviour for Tamil and Grantha, I consider that an important issue that needs to be considered carefully, because it is a technical issue with potential impact on the usability of the encoding for the purposes for which it is designed. When someone repeatedly asserts that a particular writing system is the only 'scientific' one -- I can't guess what that term might might in this context --, or that it is the only original one, but does not provide any reasoned argument beyond these assertions to indicate why this particular understanding of the Tamil writing system might imply some *technical* issues for the computer encoding Tamil, how am I, or the UTC, or anyone else supposed to respond? What are we supposed to consider on terms of technical merit? JH -- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC [email protected] A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in the light of a story. -- Paul Elie
