Re: [WMASTERS] Re: Re. 8-bit scheme and Unicode 2.0 Tamil

["Mani" <manim@ix.netcom.com>]

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Dear Dr. Srinivasan,

You wrote:

>The request for the slot allocation for all Indic languages
>probably went to some authority in India, which decided
>without consulting experts in each language.

ISCII is based on considerable research by the IIT's of India.  Between 1985
and 87, I remember reading interesting articles from IIT Madras in IEEE
magazines on their standardization methodology.  Most of the authors had
Tamil names.  If memory serves right, it was their intention to be able to
(eventually) auto-translate from any Indian language to any other.  It is an
intellectually daunting effort and ISCII is just one small step in their
ultimate goal.  I will be searching through my paper archives to find those
articles. If I find the references to them I will post them to the 'net.

>> Devanagiri has maximum number of glyphs filled
>>       103 out of 128 (25 vacant).
>> Malayalam block has lesser number of glyphs:
>>      79 out of 128 (49 vacant)
>
>They have created new symbols for zha, Short e, Short o
>in Devenagri, to permit writing South Indian languages
>in Devnagri. They have also created symbols for some
>Urdu (arabic) sounds. In short, they would like to
>see Devnagri as the "umbrella" for all the world
>languages!.

This is because they wanted to use a 'pivot' langauge for the
auto-translator.

I would like to see a critique of the ISCII/UNICODE from you or other
netters from the implementer's point of view.  The holes don't bother me as
much as the "cultural sorting" order that they have imposed on Tamil.  As a
character encoding scheme, I find much merit in ISCII/Unicode.

Mani M. Manivannan
Fremont, CA, USA.



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