Coimbatore: While the Unicode font system is being widely used across several platforms to compute in Tamil, an 84-year-old Tamil scholar has raised issues with Sanskrit letters being used to represent Tamil letters.
Eezham Tamizhappan, a retired revenue official, says that the basic multilingual plane (BMP) code chart for Tamil fonts in the Unicode Consortium enlists Sanskrit letters such as ‘Sha’, ‘Ssa’, ‘Sa’, ‘Ha’ and ‘Ja’ as Tamil letters. Tamizhappan says the scripts for these sounds were formed as late as 18th century.
“The scripts to denote these letters are Grantha letters, which were formed to represent Sanskrit sounds in Tamil and are not Tamil letters,” says Tamizhappan. Representing these letters as Tamil letters would be a disservice to the language as it would distort the number of letters in Tamil, he says. “Ancient grammatical treatises say there are 247 letters in Tamil. But people, who look up the Unicode’s BMP code chart would be led to believe there are 252 letters in Tamil.”
Also, the code chart lists ‘Om’ as a Tamil character. “Om has no single-letter representation in Tamil. It is the combination of two letters and cannot be assigned a character status in Tamil. Also it is a religious sign,” Tamizhappan says.
In 2015, a person called Sri Ramana Sharma had submitted a proposal to include notations for fractions and symbols in the Unicode Tamil code chart. The consortium had written to the Tamil Nadu government for suggestion. In 2016, the state formed a 21-member committee comprising Tamizhappan to consider the veracity of the proposal. “We perused several sources and epigraphs and submitted that several scripts in Sharma’s proposal did not match with what was used in earlier,” he says.
When he was in the committee, Tamizhappan says, he had raised with state officials the issue of Grantha letters being enlisted as Tamil letters. “I was told it would be discussed in another meeting, but it never happened,” he says. Tamizhappan has also written a letter to the chief minister on July 4, stating the issue. “I’m yet to get a reply.”
Tamizhappan says the state government has a representation in the Unicode Consortium and using that position, the state has to push for correcting the code chart. “The Grantha letters should be enlisted in a separate chart and be labelled as ‘Grantha letters used in Tamil’. Technically it is possible,” he says.