Re: Betreft: Re: Virama (was: New and Improved Script....)

At 05:48 21.3.2000 -0800, Barry Garcia wrote:
> >
> >BTW I found that traditional Malayalam script is essentially the same as
> >Grantha.  HTH!
>
>Hmm, i should check that out.Tamil seems to look very similar too, and it
>even uses some grantha characters for some sounds.
> >
You will find that the TAM script has departed from GRA much more than MAL
has.  I don't know to what extent the differences of TAM are due to
conscious design choices when adapting the script to the simpler phonology*
of Tamil, or reflects influence from spontaneous developments in cursive
writing.  As likely as not it is both.  AAMOF your original request for
info on GRA set me hunting around the net, and it ended with a Tamil
student in the States snail-mailing me photocopies of a book describing GRA
-- written in to me unintelligible Tamil, but with syllable values given in
Devanagari as well! :-)  In my thank-you mail I remarked on the surprising
dissimilarity between TAM and GRA, and in his answer he informed me that
MAL is much, much closer, which I was able to verify by looking in a
MAL-ENG dictionary at my city library.  Be warned that both TAM and MAL
have recently (1980s) undergone reforms to make them easier to handle on
computers -- most radical in MAL -- so you should go for older sources,
i.e. from the period of the Raj, to get reliably traditional info.

astu tubhyam sarvam mangalam!


/BP

"Doubt grows with knowledge" -Goethe