Re: [WMASTERS] Re: Unanswered Questions!

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

Dear Selva,

My suggestion to include ksha came from the *users* of Tamil DTP software
in Malaysia/Singapore for the past decade.  It was a lot easier for me to
put it in than *trying* to educate them *not* to use it. I do not have any 
personal preferance to this - if it's left out, my guess is DTP font 
developers may just have to squeze it in some place - back to the same
old problem of incompatible font encodings again.

One other work around to this will be to have a 'key' defined in the kbd
(Kalyan, please do not come back to me with the kbd first or coding first
argument again <smile>) and have the driver render k(oRRu)+ sha as selva
suggested.  Question here is "will this be acceptable by the user 
community ?".

My main concern here is the *one* standard we are trying to shoot for may
not materialise :-(  It's not purely linguistic/technical arguments alone
that goes into the standards process.  Creating the *standard* alone is
a battle - do we want to get into another battle of defining/changing how
one writes tamil first ?  We may loose the war :-(

anbudan,

~ MUTHU

At 12:44 PM 9/16/97 -0400, C.R. Selvakumar wrote:
>@Dear Muthu,
>@
>@Pl. read further:
>@
>@Muthu Nedumaran (Ezil) wrote:
>@>
>@>  ________Stuff Deleted________
>@>
>@> >  4. Encoding "Ksha" as a character.
>@> >
>@> >     ANS: If it is there in the Table, and as far as we dont need those
>@> >          positions, they can be there. Technically we are not losing
>@> >          anything.
>@> >
>@> >          But personally what I feel is(And I hope its generally logical
>@> >          too!), A language need not have a redundant/unnecessary
>@> >          **character** in its character list. By having it in our
>@> >Table,
>@> >          we are encouraging the people to use it as a separate
>@> >character.
>@> >          But actually it is just a style of writing combined letters.
>@> >          We are not losing any **sound** by leaving it.
>@> 
>@> Sorry Nagu, I do not think I'm qualified to do an analysis on ksha. It's
>@> OK for me both ways.  Having it there appears easier to me and I do not
>@> see any ambiguity ;-)
>@> 
>@> >Things To Do List:
>@> 
>@> I'm skipping this...for now.
>@> 
>@> anbudan,
>@> 
>@> ~ MUTHU
>@
>@OK. I understand that there is no **technical** problem there. May be
>@this thread is not the place to discuss about this problem. So, for our
>@STANDARDIZATION effort I give the GREEN signal with "Ksha" :-)
>
>
>         Please don't include Ksha, for heaven's sake,
>         and waste a space. I suggest that you
>         include a symbol for f instead. I suggest a tamil symbol va with a 
>         short horizontal line on the right post. I was going to
>         suggest in a web page soon, but you guys are going so
>         fast ! On another topic,
>         I don't understand why Dr. K. Srinivasan has *two*
>         tamil 'a' in his valaisri. I've not had a chance to
>         look at the latest arrangement of the 7-bit and 8-bit layouts.
>         [ I did look at the Unicode 2 briefly. Incidently, I was
>         irked by their terminology of 'anuswara'(puLLi, oRRu) 
>         and 'visarga' (aaytham). Can someone point out these
>         mistakes to those Unicode fellows? ]
>         Can someone please post some deadlines for making decisions ?
>
>         I want to point out to Dr. Kalyan that 
>         writing k(oRRu)+ sha is okay and it may be misleading
>         to make comparisons with with tamil 'Ukaarams' 
>         ( such as why we should not do thu+kaal for thU). Ksha is not
>         a tamil letter and does not occur often. People have been misusing
>         this letter Ksha for writing kaatchi as kaakshi ( while the
>         word is a proper tamil word with kaN > kaaN > kaatchi). 
>         List 10 words with Ksha other than pakshi (=bird) 
>         ( we should properly be using paRavai)
>         Instead please include a symbol for 'f'. 
>
>         Just like we want to include roman letters and
>         copyright and trademark symbols, we may want to include
>         a limited set of grantha letters such as sha, ha and possibly
>         other common symbols like greek mu ( for referring to micro) etc.
>         But Ksha is certainly not needed.
>         Please include which are more useful than Ksha.
>
>         anbudan selvaa
>         
>         
>@
>@anbudan,
>@nagu.
>@
>@
>@
>@
>
>