Re: Tamil question

Quoth Boudewijn (about Tamil writing):

>All (and more) is revealed in Daniels:
>
>  Daniels, Peter and William Bright (eds.). 1996. The world's writing
>systems. Oxford:
>     Oxford University Press.
Marh'ava~!  That book is in the reference section at the local public
library, and I read up on it constantly.  I might as well buy the book!

>An on-line resource that _could_ be useful (but I'm not promising anything,
>just giving the result of an altavista search);
>
>http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/stone_catend/tr1.htm
Well it didn't go much into depth about Grantha/Tamil, but it did help with
things like the (very!) extended Devanagari script (uses the _nukta_ or
point below for Dravidian alveolars, Arabic/Persian loan consonants in Urdu,
etc.), and how the Indian scripts are grouped together.

It seems like the scripts used for Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam are simpler
and more in line with Sanskrit conventions (how vowels are marked with
consonants, shapes of some characters) than Tamil, which has developed its
script highly.  Telugu and Kannada are almost identically written, in fact,
and Malayalam seems to have some similarity in design to Burmese/Myanmar (as
does Oriya, an Eastern Indic script similar to Bengali and Assamese).

Now what I can't quite understand is Sinhalese script...

Danny

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