Re: Transliteration scheme.

["Muthu Nedumaran (Ezil)" <muthu@murasu.com>]

Dear Vasu,

You are absolutely right about the very many transliteration formats used
today - just as keyboards, and font encoding standards.  So much so it's
getting too difficult to identify and recognise all those that are around.

We all agree that we should consolidate these into just one format - and
as you mentioned, we could start with what's in the Tamil lexicon.

For a start, could someone who has access to it kindly post what's in it ?

Regards,

~ MUTHU

At 06:32 PM 9/2/97 -0400, Vasu Renganathan wrote:
>
>
>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.
>
>
>
>