TIME FOR TAMIL SCRIPT REFORM IS LONG OVERDUE

Periyar EVR thought of Tamil script reform, a part of which was adopted by the Government of Tamilnadu then headed by Thiru.M.G.Ramachandran.Now yesterday's Deccan Chronicle broke a story in its first page.Let me reproduce that below in verbatim.

8 YEAR SEARCH FAILS FOR TAMIL CODE.

An 8 year search for an encoding language that would make possible the representation of all characters of the script on computers and make them applicable to creating software may have failed. Mr.N.Anbarasan, Chief Executive Officer of the Bangalore based Apple soft and member of the task force constituted by the State Government to coordinate activities relating to the development of 16 bit character code, revealed that the encoding scheme being tested is not usable in any of the suggested applications. Speaking to this newspaper Mr.Anbarasan said the Level -I encoding had not enabled the use of Tamil in application software. " The claims made to the contrary during the Conference on Tamil 16-bit character encoding held on September 2,2006 and on all earlier occasions were misleading" Mr.Anbarasan alleged.

The State Government had in 1999 conducted a conference to discuss issues involved in emerging font based standards for Tamil and to seek more code space for the language in the Unicode standard. However, the idea, had become unrealistic, Mr.Anbarasan said.

He wanted to know why the state Government was not able to get the required code space although it claimed that the proposed encoding scheme was efficient,scientific and cost effective. In his view the government had sought more code space merely on some hypothetical assumptions and submitted a proposal to UNICODE through the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.

The Unicode Consortium, which studied the proposal observed in the UTC document [L2/01-430] that it should be justified by scientific studies. The Tamil Virtual University however tested the proposed scheme and called it efficient without even considering the scientific views of the members of the task force constituted to monitor the test results, he said.
The State Government displayed the proposed scheme on the Internet for the comments of the Tamil community. After receiving the comments for the proposal, a conference was held in the city on September 21 last year to review the scheme and make its recommendations to the state government.

Courtesy : Deccan Chronicle 30/11/2007 First Page

Speaking at Mahakavi Bharathiar's 125 th birth anniversary organized by Bharathy Ilakiya Peravai, N.Nandhivarman said while we captured Chennai Corporation we installed neon lights with a board Thamizh Vazhga, instead of making Tamil medium of instruction in our educational institutions. At that time the Anti Hindi Movement was fresh and people would have easily assimilated Tamil medium in educational institutions, tamil language usage in courts and elsewhere. We missed the chance at the ripe time to realise the Tamil \naspirations.Now it appears we will be losing if Tamil is not getting accepted in Unicode. Instead of conferences and public shows researches should be done silently encouraging pioneers like Kaniyathamil Software Private Limited, and assembling real scholars to argue the case for Tamil Unicode.

The Kaniyatamil Software's web site http://www.kaniyatamil.com/

/periyar.html/u003c/a/>/u003c/div/>/n/u003cdiv/">www.tamilminulagam.com\u003cWBR\>/periyar.html\u003c/a\>\u003c/div\>\n\u003cdiv\> \u003c/div\>\n\u003cdiv\>Professor V.C.Kulandaisamy had written about Tamil script reform mooted by Periyar EVR. Is it not appropriate to deliberate whether Tamil script reform could make Tamil acceptable to codification in Unicode Consortium. Let us ponder and debate.



-- nandhivarman