Re-Construct Tamil Unicode System

To:  www.unicode.org

In India, Tamil is the most used langauge in internet. The Following results will show the importance of tamil in internet usage in India.

On Thursday, February 05, 2004 6.59 EST (USA)
The number of pages returned by google using keywords,
Arabic - 8,130,000
Tamil - 3,070,000
Hindi - 3,060,000


(tamil is also used in internet as thamizh and thamil, so the number of tamil-internet usage is most probably higher than this).

The present UNICODE system is based on iscii (indian encoding system), which has designed tamil encoding system with lot of errors. Since many indian languages has more than 500 characters, allocating a seperate UNICODE character for each characters in these langauge is not feasible, so iscii designed a system with lesser number of characters to represent all characters. For example, you have to use two or more key-strokes to type a single indian lanaguage letter.

Tamil is entirely different than other Indian langauges (in writing system). Tamil has only 313 characters (including sanskritized letters). So, allocating a character for each tamil-letter is feasible and must. Not only that According to UNICODE RULES (http://www.unicode.org), each letter in a lanaguage should be allocated a seperate character. In the view of uniformity iscii has given only 128 positions for tamil. That too only 61 positions are in use. even for the frequent uyir-mei letter (e.g. 'ka' )you have to use two characters in iscii. iscii also has missed some characters in tamil.

Unicode System is very improtant for world languages. For example, Windows-2000 is following unicode system, so you can use tamil in windows 2000. UNICODE system acts as a international standard. So applications are being and will be developed in UNICODE system. So correcting the unicode system for tamil is the most important neccessity for a popular indian langauge usage in computers.

Disadvatages of iscii in Tamil:
* The size of the file will go high. Since the size goes high, the time to load tamil-unicode files by computer applications (including browsers) is approx 3 times slower than what is possible. for example you have to use three characters to store tamil letter "KOO" instead of a single character "KOO".
* iscii has missed two frequently used letters in tamil "shri" and "Sha", so we cannot represent these letters using unicode.

We understand that UNICODE 2-byte system is very important for global communication and also aware that, In future, many world-language applications will be developed in unicode. We Tamilians/Indians/Tamil-Users beleive that Tamil in Unicode has not been treated well and has to be reconstructed. We need a seperate characters for each letter in tamil.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The Re-Construct Tamil Unicode System Petition to www.unicode.org was created by and written by Prakash Gomathinayagam.  This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no endorsement of this petition, express or implied, by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. For technical support please use our simple Petition Help form.

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