suzmccarth wrote:

> Who says that James Evans did not see a Tamil grammar - they were in
> print in England at that time and a Methodist missionary, Percival,
> was translating the Bible into Tamil. Evans was a Methodist. I am
> not saying that Evans was familiar with Tamil - I am saying that it
> is possible that he had seen the Tamil writing system.

Why do you want Evans to have seen Tamil in particular? because Cree and
Tamil are the two scripts you happen to be interested in?

What if he'd been exposed to Sanskrit?

> Just because he was young - he left for Canada with his family at
> age 22 or 23 doesn't mean that he hadn't seen Tamil. When did the
> average qalam member become interested in writing systems - age 12 -
> 14?

Then all you have to do is put him in a library that held such a book.
Could a Methodist access university libraries in England at that time?

> I am not trying to make a new theory out of this but I am tryng to
> fill in the historical details to understand the evolution of the
> Tamil script.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...