--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> There are also arguably minor elements to the classification.

How do

> we handle cases where abugidas

seem to have become

> syllabaries (Ethiopic and, so we are hearing, Tamil)?

In Japanese and Cree there are both glyph-based and
phonetic-based keyboard input editors. The glyph-based input
operates on one single keystroke. The phonetic input uses
phonetic segmentation through the Latin alphabet or Romanji.

In Chinese there is input based on either the visual elements of
the glyph, Wobi, Cangjie, Q9; or the phonetic elements (Pinyin or
Zhuyin) along with a candidate box. There is a large part of the
population for Japanese and Chinese who have difficulty with
phonetic input. Those who are literate in English or very familiar
with Pinyin, Zhuyin or Romanji can use phonetic input easily.
However, input by visual elements from left to right and top to
bottom is more accessible to the entire population.

For Tamil, typewriter input was originally by CV elements in order
of visual sequence. It did not require phonetic segmentation.
However, in the new Unicode system, input, so far, is only in
phonetic order. This requires abstract phonetic segmentation,
which does not come naturally to those Tamil who are not
literate in English.

Therefore, a large part of the Tamil population are still
keyboarding in the legacy fonts and using a conversion utility to
convert to Unicode. Is it possible for Unicode to encode the
Tamil CV elements also in order of visual sequence and provide
an equivalency table between the two?

When I keyboard polytonic Greek, there is a system for
equivalency between precomposed and decomposed glyphs.
Great care seems to be taken for compatibility.

With most languages that I have learned to keyboard, I only need
from 10 minutes to a couple of hours to find something suitable
for working with children. I have been working on Tamil for 6
months now. I still am not satisfied that I could present any
application now available for Unicode Tamil with confidence.

Tamil script needs to be recognized as a syllabic script with
provision for glyph-based input as exists in Japanese, Chinese
and Cree. How this is done is not be important to me. That this
is done is vital. Why are Tamil researchers working on
handwriting recognition? They should have some simple visual
sequence input that is appropriate for their script.

Suzanne McCarthy