--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> wrote:

> I think it's good to know why people do things that seem, well,

peculiar;

> helps calm the waters.

Another reason I wasn't snipping was technical. I wrote a post and
then, fizz, the screen erased and I had to start again. I was often
forgetting that I had to go back and snip all over again. It seems
to work better if I go off-line to write.

I should probably explain one of the many reason I looked up qalam.
I was reading the Unicode version 4 and it said something to this
effect. Chinese characters are ideographic. And later Indic
scripts are abugidas. I wasn't sure what to make of that. Maybe
there is a glossary somewhere that I missed. I came into this group
already feeling that there was a difficulty with the use of
terminology.

There is also a sharp contrast between how Ethiopic and Indic
scripts are coded. Ethiopic is coded as a syllabary much like Cree
with the first column of characters representing CV syllables. The
first column appears to me to be unmodified characters but still
very definitely a set CV syllables.

Tamil, on the other hand appears as a list of consonants and
vowels. The consonants have the inherent vowel 'a'. The user has to
construct all the other syllables. Logically I would expect to see
CV syllables rather than consonants with inherent vowels.

There are, of course, many technical and pragmatic explanations for
the coding which I have no reason to question, now that Uniscribe is
working and the consonants and vowels aren't strewing themselves
across the screen in a disconnected fashion.

Since I was previously very familiar with Cree, coded as syllabary,
and somewhat familiar with Ethiopic, coded as a syllabary, I was
having trouble figuring out why Tamil, listed as an abugida, had
only consonants and vowels that could not be connected. The main
point is that the terminology leads to misunderstandings, of which I
have had many.

Suzanne McCarthy