> I do notice however that most Indic language sites refer to
> the syllable as the basic unit - often what is referred to as
> a letter or character is actually a syllable, this is the
> basic element.

For an overview (which may answer several of your questions below) of how
they work and how that is handled in an encoding like ISCII or Unicode you
could read my Unicode technical note:

An Introduction to Indic Scripts http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn10/ (links
to a PDF)

(HTML version at
http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/indic-overview/Overview.html for those
with necessary fonts and rendering equipment)

Note that to enable keyboard input of Tamil, you need fonts with appropriate
rendering information and the Uniscribe dll to bridge between the characters
and the presentation forms. A huge benefit of this approach is that by thus
separating content and presentation, you can apply different fonts to
achieve different approaches to presentation for the same underlying Tamil
text.

To create a syllable based encoding seems to me to involve an extraordinary
amount of difficulty for developers and users alike, for no obvious gain.


RI


============
Richard Ishida
W3C

contact info:
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/

W3C Internationalization:
http://www.w3.org/International/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: suzmccarth [mailto:suzmccarth@...]
> Sent: 01 June 2004 07:34
> To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: Unicode Tibetan (Was: syllable level encoding in unicode)
>
> Thanks Nicholas for all your comments.
>
> Yes,there are a lot of talented people creating software in
> India and I notice that there is a lot going on right now. I
> think some Indic lg. developers are trying to create a
> software that will approximate syllable level encoding.
>
> I do notice however that most Indic language sites refer to
> the syllable as the basic unit - often what is referred to as
> a letter or character is actually a syllable, this is the
> basic element.
>
> I started working in Windows 98 with njstar and MoTaml
> software and found it quite good but when I wanted to put up
> my multilingual website I bought a Windows XP laptop(the
> reason for switching from a Mac which I used earlier is sad
> but too long to revisit) Then I found that the language
> resources on WinXP was amazingly satisfying until I tried the
> Indic languages.
>
> I have been working with the standard keyboard and that
> doesn't bother the Chinese and Korean students. In fact, I
> don't see why Tamil couldn't have a system very like Korean.
> Actually Tamil has a relatively small repertoire of phonemes
> which work well on the keyboard but of course are difficult
> to combine and sequence. Using the on screen visual keyboard
> in Windows accessories which switches script with the input
> language makes all this possible.
>
> I don't think the problem is political but maybe more a
> misunderstanding. Since Indic languages appear to be written
> with an "alphabet", they got alphabetic encoding not syllable
> encoding.
> My feeling is that Tamil looks like an alphabet and functions
> like a syllabary.
>
> Suz