Sinnathurai Srivas wrote (I'm combining a couple of his emails here):
Now, for science,for understanding purpose, I simply wrote, if we want
to build a proper humanoid we need to build the mechanical (or
biological) speech organs, not create a limited database of
sounds/phonemes. Is this something difficult to understand?
It is difficult to understand why you think this, since speech synthesis
(aka text-to-speech) has been done electronically, not mechanically, for
decades. But more to the point of the discussion about Unicode, this
has absolutely nothing to do with Unicode.
> Is it wrong to catergorically stating that we need to prserve this
> Places of Articulation for the sake of the world, not just for
> tamil alone?
I have not heard of anyone trying to destroy points of articulation.
They existed long before Tamil was written, and Unicode will not change
that.
> So it may be that Unicode Consortium should leave Tamil alone, rather
> than trying to change it like ilogically and dictatorially introduce
> U+0bb6. Because that is the only scientific system that humans have in
> their hand.
The Unicode Consortium is not trying to change the Tamil writing system.
Rather, it is creating another way to represent the symbols of the
writing system--so in addition to palm leaves, stone, papyrus, paper, or
whatever other ways there are of writing Tamil texts, there is now a way
of doing it with 0s and 1s, and making groups of those 0s and 1s appear
on computer screens or printed pages as letters, thereby allowing people
to read Tamil texts on computers. U+0BB6 happens to be another set of
0s and 1s, and if you don't like that number or its visual
representation on the computer screen, there's no dictator forcing you
to use it. In fact, you don't need to use a computer at all; you can
continue to use paper and pencil or ink.
--
Mike Maxwell
[email protected]
"A library is the best possible imitation, by human beings,
of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and
understood at the same time... we have invented libraries
because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we
try to do our best to imitate them." --Umberto Eco
