I have been wondering how Korean was able to get both alphabetic
units and syllables encoded in unicode but Tamil and Indic languages
cannot.

I have read a lot of symposium speeches on this but I am wondering
what the real story is. Can anyone help me.

As background, I have an ESL class and have my students keyboarding
in Chinese, Korean and Tamil. The Chinese students use Pinyin Input
and it works like dream for them - very satisfying. Korean also
seems very simple to keyboard for a child.

However, Tamil has been a nightmsre. First, we used MoTaml, a Win98
compatible font that organized input by visual sequence and
coresponded with handprinting in Tamil - not great but possible.
Then we tried the Unicode version in WinXP. Well, we get it and can
use it but it is not esthetically satisfying or straightforward to
use.

It seems from what I read that Tamil speakers have a strong feeling
about syllable level representation, certainly as much as Koreans
do, but they have a very unsatisfacory system. You should just
watch the difference in the children keyboarding.

I feel that Indic languages have been disadvantaged by western
assumptions that they have an "alphabetic" system because of its
appearance and no one really looks at how the system functions in
their culture.

Can anyone help me with more background on this or connect me to
someone else who is working in this area.