suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > I wonder how much of your work is the work that turns out to be the
> > subject of intense complaint and criticism from those who try to
> >use it.
>
> I want to clear the air and say that *my* intense complaint about
> Tamil had to do only with several associated factors in the transition
> from former encodings to Unicode. I would welcome any additional
> comments from the list.

I wasn't talking about Tamil and know nothing of such complaints.

> However, there is still a small group of Tamil who would like to see
> Tamil encoded as an alphabet, with no characters which represent
> syllables. That is, they would like to see the consonant plus puLLi
> encoded as a pure consonant, and then the short a vowel would be keyed
> in following the consonant and effectively remove the puLLI. They
> insist that Tamil is an alphasyllabary, not an abugida.

I have no idea what this means: have they studied my WWS footnote, and
Bill's article in WLL, so they understand the intended distinction
between the two terms?

Or does it simply mean that Bill Bright is well-known in Tamil Nadu and
has used that term since at least 1990 and taught it to them?

> There is another group, which I haven't seen to be as active, which
> would have liked all the syllables encoded. Sone possibly want both
> letters and syllables like Korean. However, I fully understand that
> there is no actual plan to reencode Tamil. (There do seem to be many
> further details to work out aside from this.)
>
> As far as I can see the disagreement about whether Tamil is an
> alphasyllabary or an abugida has not been resolved. However, I am not
> aware of how this affects the implementation of Tamil, if at all.

What "disagreement" are you talking about? Except in the single case of
Phags pa, there is absolutely no difference in the practical application
of the two terms.

> The Tamil come out strongly for the term alphasyllabary, (I have
> received personal email from some developers which confirms this).
> Steever's article in WWS also calls Tamil an alphasyllabary so I do
> not see any disagreement there.

How many times do I have to tell you: the chapters edited by Bill use
"alphasyllabary," the chapters edited by me don't. (And he rewrote most
of his chapters, anyway.)

> One note of interest is that I did check Steever's earlier published
> articles, (see George Campbell, Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets) on

No, do NOT see that pile of crap. Campbell may have been the most
ignorant layperson who ever wrote about languages. (See my review in
Word.)

> Tamil and found that he represented the Tamil writing system with a
> syllabary chart with the consonant plus puLLi down the left hand side
> as the basic consonant character. However, in WWS he provides a
> completely different organization of the Tamil writing system, more
> like other Indic scripts, with the consonant plus inherent a as the
> basic character.

If you're _really_ interested, I could go look in the mss. and see what
Sandy submitted vs. what Bill ended up with.

> The Tamil themselves argue that from the time of the Tolkapiyyam, 2000
> years (?) ago, the consonant plus puLLI has been considered the 'pure
> consonant' and the base form of the consonant.
>
> All this seems like an argument over labels, but I support the Tamil
> being able to chose what their system is called and wish to respect
> their designation of their own system.

"The Tamil" (anthropologists got away from that animal-style way of
referring to peoples decades ago) discuss their script in English and
not in Tamil??

> However, I don't want to reopen the argument and can only say that to
> me, there is more than one way of looking at a writing system, more
> than one perspective.
>
> I apologize if I have in the past criticized anyone in the list for
> any of this. It seems like an issue of historic interest now and not
> important, except that various points of view be respected.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...