Re: glyph choices for char.encoding -version 1.2

["Harold F. Schiffman" <haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>]

> 
> >For the old-style tamil characters, the best approach
> >appears to be assigning them the lowest priority.

I'm happy with this.

> >I tend to agree with your preferences to have transl.
> >tamil using plain/lower ASCII roman without diacritics.
> >But I am not sure what the majority opinion is.

I think I said this before, but if this is settling down for a plain-ascii
solution, then the simplest one-to-one solution is to use capital letters
for all the "special" letters that Tamil has that can't be transliterated
with lower-case letters.  This was the solution adopted back in the 50's
in the US for teaching materials for Tamil etc. when we couldn't produce
fonts at all, or wanted something in colloquial Tamil.  

Some people don't like this, but I must say I myself have no stomach
for the double-letter transliterations (lh, zh, Nh whatever) that people
come up with; and I won't belabor the point but the WNTamil
transliteration (Numerals instead of upper-case) is also elegant (but
unaccceptable to some.)  For the two n's of a word like naan "first person
pronoun, I" an output algorithm can handle the fact that at the beginning
of a word or before [t] it's one form, and in other positions it has
another (reNDu cuuLi na).  Some other problems may occur, but many things
are predictible:  ng always occurs before [k] etc.  

Hal Schiffman



> 
> Let's hope we hear them too - not just a *vote* of yes
> or no - but with some supporting notes :-)
> 
> >i) Should be go for transliteration schemes that are 
> >    based on plain ASCII without diacritics or 
> >    adopt a scheme with diacritics ?
> >ii) what should be the actual scheme under either of
> >   the above two possibilities?
> >
> >If we decide to go for plain ASCII without diacritics,
> >then there is no need to keep these markers in the
> >character encoding scheme.