[INDOLOGY] Unicode font for ancient and modern Tamil

Thu Mar 16 22:18:25 UTC 2023

Dear Jean-Luc, Dear Manu (if I may),

Indeed, I was talking about all of the forms both of you mentioned, namely

- long ra with a vinculum
- short ra with a macron. The macron may even be linked to the ra if one 
writes very fast.
- line covering a puḷḷi (to correct a mistake)

The first two enable disambiguation. It is not clear to me from a 
historical viewpoint whether they were introduced for the purpose, or 
whether they were natural evolutions (people do tend to link characters 
together when they write fast). The aesthetic dimension may also be 
relevant.

These are forms in use in my family. I am attaching a photograph with 
examples in my own handwriting. My parents used the same and, as I said, 
I have encountered them in manuscripts but didn't make a special note of 
them since these forms were familiar to me.

The vinculum is a line to "link together" several characters; 
mathematicians, especially British, used to write this over expressions 
as a substitute for a parenthesis. Thus, in (self-explanatory) LaTeX 
code, \overline{x+y} means (x+y). (This is consistent with the Latin 
etymology: a /vinculum/ is a link, /in vincula/ means in fetters etc.)  
The first example seemed to me to be a vinculum rather than a macron 
since it links the two characters.

About the examples with e and o, it may be that the additional marks are 
sloppily written puḷḷi-s and not bars. I am referring to தொல்காப்பியம், 
எழுத்ததிகாரம், நூன்மரபு 15-16 that read :

மெய்யி னியற்கை புள்ளியொடு நிலையல்
எகர ஒகரத் தியற்கையு மற்றே.

(For people who do not read Tamil, this means that consonants 
intrinsically stand with a dot, and that short e and short o have the 
same intrinsic feature. Tolkaappiyam is the first grammar of classical 
Tamil; it actually includes quite a bit of literary analysis in addition 
to grammar in the narrow sense and, as we see here, treats language as 
written as well as spoken.)

Kind regards to both,

         Satyanad K.

Le 16/03/2023 à 20:12, Jean-Luc Chevillard a écrit :
> Dear Satyanad,
>
> as a clarification,
> are you talking about the special forms seen in this image,
> taken from a 17th cent. Goa MS
> in the words which would nowadays be printed as
> ஆரோபிக்கிறது, ஆரோகணம், ஆரோக்கியம், ஆரோசை?
>
> (I obtained those images from Cristina Muru, many years ago)
>
> Best wishes
>
> -- Jean-Luc
>
>
> On 16/03/2023 16:33, Satyanad KICHENASSAMY wrote:
>>
>> Dear Charles,
>>
>> Nice project. Please let us know when the revised font will be 
>> available. Regarding the long ra, I assume you are planning to create 
>> a glyph for the character with a vinculum? (Or is it already there?) 
>> Similarly, the short ra is often written with a macron to avoid 
>> confusion.
>>
>> One may want to include also the lines that are used to cover a 
>> pu.l.li (and thus, restore the vocalization).
>>
>> Best,
>>
>>       Satyanad K.
>>
>> Le 16/03/2023 à 11:42, Charles Li via INDOLOGY a écrit :
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> At the TST Project, where we're cataloguing Tamil manuscripts, we've 
>>> forked Noto Tamil and started adding old ligatures, like pre-reform 
>>> ṇā, ṟā, etc. as well as some ligatures that don't seem to have 
>>> appeared before in print, such as the below-base "ma" ligatures. See 
>>> this page for examples:
>>>
>>> https://tst-project.github.io/editor/entities.html
>>>
>>> It's still a work in progress!
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Charles
>>>
>>> On 2023-03-16 11:08, Satyanad KICHENASSAMY wrote:
>>>> Dear All,
>>>>
>>>> To follow up on Harry Spier's query, the typesetting of the older 
>>>> Tamil characters (as well as Tamil Grantha) is sometimes 
>>>> problematic. I use Akshar Unicode for contemporary Tamil, which is 
>>>> very close to the standard printed characters, but insert some 
>>>> characters from Vaigai for the classical characters -- that were 
>>>> actually the standard characters when I grew up. For Grantha, the 
>>>> e-Grantamil font is nice even though less close to the characters 
>>>> in print, but the ligatures are sometimes undone automatically, for 
>>>> reasons that I do not understand. Also, I gather it is encoded in 
>>>> the same segment as Bengali, which is another source of confusion. 
>>>> The final output can be fine, though, see examples in the following 
>>>> paper:
>>>>
>>>> https://www.persee.fr/doc/crai_0065-0536_2018_num_162_4_96658
>>>>
>>>> This being said, if there is a better solution, I would be interested.
>>>>
>>>> For a diplomatic edition, it would be nice to have fonts that 
>>>> contain as many variants as possible. Similarly, Southern Sanskrit 
>>>> manuscripts should be reproduced in their original script if 
>>>> possible, especially in diplomatic editions. For instance, va and 
>>>> ba in printed Grantha are easier to disinguish than in Nagari (this 
>>>> is also true in those palm-leaf mss that I have used).
>>>>
>>>> I remember seeing proposals arguing that some characters usually 
>>>> encoded in Unicode as ligatures in Indic language fonts should be 
>>>> treated as stand-alone glyphs, at least in Tamil. The reason is 
>>>> that you sometimes see letters such as "mo" rendered as 
>>>> "kompu-(blank in a dotted circle)-lengthening mark-ma" which is of 
>>>> course nonsense. The placement of diacritics is also misleading at 
>>>> best, as was pointed out on this list a few days ago. This is in 
>>>> addition to the issues raised by Jean-Luc Chevillard (for instance, 
>>>> the ர் cannot be written without the lower diagonal stroke on some 
>>>> fonts).
>>>>
>>>> Of course, whether one decides to overlook the differences in 
>>>> variants of one character always involves judgment. An extreme 
>>>> example would be the different versions of the character 之 in the 
>>>> famous calligraphy 蘭亭集序 Lántíngjí Xù by 王羲之 Wáng Xīzhī. For 
>>>> India, the விநாயகர் சுழி vinaayakar cu_li has slightly different 
>>>> forms depending on writers, some of which may be worth recording 
>>>> (recall that this symbol is a form of the pra.nava; the same issue 
>>>> could be raised about the pra.nava in other scripts).
>>>>
>>>> Best,
>>>>
>>>>        Satyanad Kichenassamy
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, 15 Mar 2023 13:33:42 -0400
>>>> Harry Spier via INDOLOGY<indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Received thanks to Victor Davella
>>>>> Harry Spier
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 1:21 PM Harry 
>>>>> Spier<vasishtha.spier at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Can someone recommend a good free unicode font for modern Tamil. 
>>>>>> I.e.
>>>>>> provide a link to download this.
>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>> Harry Spier
>>>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> INDOLOGY mailing list
>>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
>>> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
>>
>> -- 
>> **********************************************
>> Satyanad KICHENASSAMY
>> Professeur des Universités
>> LMR (CNRS, UMR9008)
>> Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
>> F-51687 Reims Cedex 2
>> France
>> Web:http://phare.normalesup.org/~kichenassamy
>> *********************************************
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> INDOLOGY mailing list
>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
>> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology

-- 
**********************************************
Satyanad KICHENASSAMY
Professeur des Universités
Laboratoire de Mathématiques (LMR, CNRS, UMR9008)
Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
F-51687 Reims Cedex 2
France
Web:http://phare.normalesup.org/~kichenassamy
**********************************************
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