Transliteration scheme.

[Vasu Renganathan <vasur@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>]

Dear Muthu and Kalyan,

I agree with you that standardization of transliteration schemes may not
be a big issue, as long as we are able to use diacritic symbols exactly
the way we want to do for font encoding, and it will be convenient for
sorting and other processing also.  But, as far as I know, this hasn't
happened yet though, and we go through the hassle of dealing with many
transliteration schemes - owned/invented/discovered by others. 
 
With what we have now, there are so many schemes, and we have to go
through writing conversion programs for every single scheme. I personally
find it very hard to go between different transliterated Tamil documents.
See for example how many transliteration options you have in Anjal, and
there are some grudges that yours does not include conversion of some of
the other schemes!!!

I was just wondering, if the standardization committee look into this
issue also and come up with a scheme that is officially recognized by the
Tamil Nadu Government.  If there is an effort to standardize the
transliteration scheme, my humble request is to look into the
transliteration scheme given in the Tamil lexicon by Madras University,
and use it as a basis for further changes, instead of using schemes that
follow English sound system. 


On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Muthu Nedumaran (Ezil) wrote:

> Dear Vasu,
> 
> Thanks for pointing out the issues with transliteration schemes.  Some
> points I'd like to raise from a 'usability' perspective - with a lesser
> inclination to computer based linguistic research.
> 
> I guess Kalyan's use of n^a came from the fact that it's alot easier
> to read n^adan^tu (or even n^adan^thu) in plain text versus ndadandtu.
> I was massaging this point when I was working on MURASU Anjal's romanised
> keyboard (though I used '-' instead of '^' to avoid a shift).
> 
> Also the use of caps in the middle of a word (I can understand this is
> a matter of getting used to) seem to get lesser acceptance.
> 
> I can live with oo for O, uu for U, ee for E etc.
> 
> For computer based linguistics research, I can understand your points.
> Do you have any thoughts on how we could make this "human acceptable" ?
> Esp. so with the growing interest to input Tamil through roman text ?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> ~ MUTHU

The term "human acceptable" seems to be tricky to me?  I have a kind of
feeling that you make a distinction here between "linguists acceptable"
and "human acceptable", and the ones that are acceptable by linguists are
not acceptable by human and vice versa. :-).

I just wanted to point out some of the problems in the way we use some of
the Roman letters for Tamil transliteration purposes.  I think we have to
pay little attention when we use the letters ee, oo, t, n and a few others
in our transliteration schemes. 

With kind regards,
Vasu.