[INDOLOGY] Unicode font for ancient and modern Tamil

Fri Mar 17 07:36:56 UTC 2023

PS : regarding e and o : if the examples do refer to long e and o, then the line should perhaps be interpreted as a correction over an existing dot.

On Thu, 16 Mar 2023 23:18:25 +0100
Satyanad Kichenassamy <satyanad.kichenassamy at univ-reims.fr> wrote:

> 
> 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
> **********************************************

-- 
Satyanad KICHENASSAMY <satyanad.kichenassamy at univ-reims.fr>