- comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18@icann.org

[Comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18] Comments on "Proposals for Malayalam and Tamil Scripts' Root Zone‬ Label Generation Rules"
by Dinesh Lal Nov. 21, 2018

Nov. 21, 2018

Please find attached, the comments from ICFOSS, the Nodal agency for Malayalam Computing, Government of Kerala. With Regards *Dinesh Lal D L* Technical Coordinator (e-Governance) ICFOSS, Thejaswini, Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram - 695 581 -- Dinesh Lal D L Technical Coordinator (e-Governance) ICFOSS, Thejaswini, Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram - 695 581 Phone: (+91) 9847530333 Tel: (+91) 471 2700013 Email: dineshlal(a)icfoss.in Web: www.icfoss.in

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[Comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18] A quick review of the Malayalam proposal
by 梁海 Liang Hai Nov. 7, 2018

Nov. 7, 2018

- §3, §3.1–§3.3: Unclear what the point is for having such a lengthy and detailed introduction of the script’s history. Move it to an appendix, or just remove it. - §3.5, “Sanskrit, although it falls under EGIDS 4, is not considered in Malayalam script LGR because Malayalam is rarely used to write Sanskrit.”: The Sanskrit language’s Malayalam writing system should have its own EGIDS rating for such an evaluation. - §3.6, “ICANN's Maximal Starting Repertoire (MSR) for IDN LGR is based on these exclusion rules for ZWJ and ZWNJ.”: Based on what exactly rules? - §3.6, “But there are no identified cases where a missing ZWNJ forms another valid word with different meaning.”: What’s this discussion of attested “another valid word with different meaning” meant to reflect? A wrong spelling is simply another word, and whether this “another word” means something is a vocabulary problem, which is not really relevant here. - §3.6, “Missing ZWJ means, the word is a different word with different meaning. This is very rare — …”: This pair is not relevant because the first word uses a ZWJ only because of its chillu, while chillus have atomic encodings. - §3.6, “Missing ZWJ never means a spelling mistake, but just a writing style.”: It’s plausible to try to distinguish “a spelling mistake” and “a writing style” (which can be better put as “a spelling style” though, given what the example implies). However— * The example is not relevant because it uses ZWJ for a chillu. * Basically this whole section of ZWJ and ZWNJ requirement probably needs to be preceded by the section that discusses about some ZWJ-using structures that can also be safely encoded without ZWJ, so this group of ZWJ use cases can be excluded. * Also, it’s actually unclear why “Missing ZWJ never means a spelling mistake”, as ZWJ is specified by the Unicode Standard (see Table 12-36, Use of Joinders in Malayalam, in the Core Specificartion 11.0) to have the ability of requesting a consonant stack, which is discussed in the first case as a matter of spelling mistakes. * The differentiation between a spelling mistake and a writing/spelling style also largely depends on the exact orthograhy being followed. * Note the whole situation of when a ZWJ is required and when a ZWNJ is required is highly dependent on fonts. The first case only requires a ZWNJ because Windows’s default Maayalam font, Nirmala UI, as an inappropriately produced font, forms a lot of undesired consonant stacks despite being largely a reformed-orthography font. It strikes me as an apparent necessity that, for such an LGR analysis, a survey of commonly used Malayalam fonts should first be carried out. - §3.7, Script and Orthography: Unclear why the consonant letter ള ḷa is missing. - §3.7, Anusvaram and Visargam: “… and hence is traditionally treated as a kind of vowel sign.”: There’s no causality here. Signs like anusvara and visarga are traditionally categorized together with vowel signs (and the category is not necessarily comparable to the modern concept of vowel) because they all are dependent signs that modify a base letter. - §3.7, Chillu letters (Chillaksharam) and Samvruthokarams, “Chillaksharam is an original feature of Malayalam used only with 6 consonants at present.”: A broader discussion of other rare chillus (in addition to chillu K) should be discussed. - §3.7, Chillu letters (Chillaksharam) and Samvruthokarams, “Any consonant can be followed by consonant … The chandrakkala alone at the end of a word is treated as Samvruthokaram.”: The paragraph is filled with conflicting statements. Making a clear distinction between the actual written structures and the intended phonetic sequence is important. - §3.7, Chillu letters (Chillaksharam) and Samvruthokarams, “Chandrakkala coming within a word (followed by other character(s) of the word) denotes a conjunct letter formed by the character(s) preceding and following the chandrakkala.”: Unclear if this is talking about written structures (then a visible chandrakkala sign has nothing to do with a written conjunct) or the general conjunct encoding (then the conjunct is not a letter but a sequence of consonant characters and chandrakkalas that can probably be rendered as a visual structure of conjunct). - §3.7, Chillu letters (Chillaksharam) and Samvruthokarams, “Examples of Samvruthokaram:”: The document should use a specific orthography by default and explicitly call out when a non-default orthography is discussed for some reason. Here the examples are in the traditional orthography but all the preceding content in the document is basically in the reformed orthography (eg, the “Vowel diacritics” section), and there’s no any note about this inconsistency. - §3.7, Chillu letters (Chillaksharam) and Samvruthokarams, “For the words that end in chillu, Samvruthokaram is used to make the pronunciation clearer. …”: Unclear how such a phonetic discussion (as well as the following four cases of “phonological transformations”) is relevant to written structures and encoding. Also unclear why only the orthography that uses an explicit vowel sign u is presented in the examples. - §3.7, A selection of conjunct consonants, Table 5: Adjust column widths to avoid line breaks, which make the NFL row confusing. - §5.3: See the comment below for §6.1. - §6.1, set 1: The analysis is a mess. * Note the case 1a is a non-standard de facto encoding for the written structure <chillu n base, below-base rra sign>. NBGP need to work with the Unicode Consortium and make sure they give consistent recommendations on this problematic issue. * Also, as 1a is rendered as a wrong structure in Windows’ default Malayalam font Nirmala UI, it’s unclear why this encoding is not disallowed because of “rendering problem” (which makes 1b disallowed). * About 1b, note the only working sequence (so the only intended sequence) for Nirmala UI on Windows is <NA, VIRAMA, ZWJ, RRA>, although the standard <CHILLU N, VIRAMA, RRA> is somehow also implemented in the font (therefore can be rendered by it with a shaping engine that supports the sequence, while Windows’ shaping engine does support the sequence). * Then it’s unclear why “it is safe to disallow” <CHILLU N, VIRAMA, RRA> while allowing <NA, VIRAMA, RRA> when both sequences have rendering problems and only the former one is recommended by the Unicode Standard’s Core Specification. * As ordinary fonts shouldn’t render a character sequence intended for <chillu n base, below-base rra sign> as <chillu n base, rra nase>, therefore there isn’t visual confusability despite spelling and phonetic relationship, it’s unclear why this variant is blocked. Are other spelling alternatives to be blocked too? - §6.1, set 2: See the comment below for Appendix C. - §6.2.1, Table 10: A bad rendering of the Tamil glyph in the set 6. - §7.1.2: Note the document basically suggests such a pattern: `C[M][B|X] | V[B|X] | C[U+0D41]H | L` * Rule 5 and 6 should be safe but it’s really unsettling to restrict something not because of written limitations but phonology and spelling conventions. * Rule 7 doesn’t seem to be consistent with the restrictions suggested in §6.1 (which disallows ളള… and allows ള്). See the comment below for Appendix C. * Note that the Unicode Standard’s Core Specification suggests (see Table 12-33, page 504, in the referred Core Spec 10.0) a samvruthokaram not only appears at the end of a word, but can also appear as an independent vowel letter (typically a word-initial structure) or be followed by a anusvaram. The inconsistency between the Core Spec’s claim and this document’s analysis must be addressed, and the WLE rules might need to be loosened up. Note this is a typical case exhibiting how dangerous it is to set up a restrictive pattern not simply based on written structures but the limited known spelling conventions and phonological theories. - §10, Appenfix A, Table A-1: The last column seems to be meant to reflect confusable renderings, then the renderings of sequences and atomic characters can be simply merged if the authors don’t have a word processor that allows the sequences to be rendered with correct reordering and without dotted circles. - §10, Appenfix A, “Although, Unicode defines this canonical decomposition, the Standard recommends not to use the sequence”: The Unicode Standard doesn’t recommend “not to use the sequence[s]”. - §12, Appendix C: * I agree the ള്ള vs ളള pair is indeed worth discussing, since this pair is probably the single most confusable pair in the reformed orthography (while the traditional orthography naturally relies on a greater number of details) because of the structural disadvantage of the letter ള, and other comparably confusable pairs (മ്മ vs മമ, ത്ത vs തത, ക്ത vs കത, etc) are indeed significantly less confusable. * However, if the NBGP plans to make restrictions for such an issue, a thorough and accurate research must be first finished. I don’t think either the NBGP or the IP’s current researches and considerations are enough. * From what is presented in the document, it seems both the NBGP and the IP have been analyzing only words but not what combinations can occur when inter-word spaces are removed from a sequence of words. However the latter should be a key topic for the discussion, and apparently it can introduce many more sequences that are previously considered highly limited, eg, a much larger number of ളള. * Also, it’s not appropriate if the authors have been only analyzing the character sequence but not the final glyph sequence (which includes reordered glyphs, such as pre-base vowel signs, which can break an otherwise confusable sequence, eg, ളള + െ → ളളെ). * “The consonant ള (0D33) rarely follows another ള in Malayalam, except in the case of some place names.”: It’s unclear why the NBGP considers attested place names and phrase contractions that contain ളള can be disallowed. The “Feedback from the community” section makes a pretty clear case to me that the NBGP is again over-restricting a script/language based on limited knowledge and prescriptivist grammar. Best, 梁海 Liang Hai https://lianghai.github.io

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[Comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18] very good initiative
by Ajay . Nov. 6, 2018

Nov. 6, 2018

This is very useful for a lot of people in the state of Kerala.

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[Comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18] മലയാളഭാഷയിലെ അനുസ്വാരം "ം" എന്ന സ്വരം ഇംഗ്ലീഷിലെ “o” സാമ്യമുള്ളത്‌ ഏത്‌ തരത്തിലുള്ള പ്രശ്‌നങ്ങൾക്കാണ് കാരണമാകുന്നത്‌? വിശദീകരിക്കാമൊ?
by SELVARAJ R Nov. 5, 2018

Nov. 5, 2018

Sent from my iPhone

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[Comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18] മലയാളഭാഷ യൂണിക്കോഡിലൂടെ ടൈപ്പ്‌ ചെയ്യുമ്പോൾ രൂപപ്പെടുന്ന മറ്റൊരു ഫോഡ് പ്രശ്നമാണ് "റ്റ" കാരം ചില സന്ദർഭങ്ങളിൽ "ററ" എന്ന് ടൈപ്പ്‌ ചെയ്യുന്നത്‌.
by SELVARAJ R Nov. 5, 2018

Nov. 5, 2018

Sent from my iPhone

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[Comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18] (no subject)
by Gowtham Raghunathan Nov. 5, 2018

Nov. 5, 2018

best point to argue for this initiative is... English is a language which has unique letters and unique pronounciation other languages has identical letters and identical pronounciation. it will make an easy way for cyber theft.. hope you won't go with this decision falls under serious category thank you

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[Comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18] Malayalam LGR feedback
by Santhosh Thottingal Nov. 3, 2018

Nov. 3, 2018

1. The case of റ്റ is similar to ള്ള in the document. A font that does not stack the റ + ് + റ can render it in horizontal format. So a word like മീറററ് can be spoofed by applying virama to the last two റ. It is rare to see a font that does not stack റ്റ, but instead of depending on that week assumption, better add a WLE rule similar to ള്ള. (This is also mentioned in Appendix part of the document as community feedback- That feedback was from me.) 2. The document should NOT be conflicting with nta as explained in Unicode version 11, Chapter 12. In the table under 6.1, 1a, 1b, 1c - all three should be allowed as variants and should not block any of them. Currently 1b is blocked. 1b is mentioned in Unicode Chapter 12. So it should be allowed. There is a debate going on whether that is a correct sequence or not in Unicode, it may or may not be corrected. As it exists in Chapter 12, it should be treated as variant. -- Santhosh Thottingal | സന്തോഷ് തോട്ടിങ്ങൽ Typeface designer and Language computing professional, Senior Software Engineer at Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering thottingal.in | smc.org.in

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[Comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18] Feedback on §6.1 In-script variants Set #1: sequence <chillu-n, virama, rra>
by Cibu Oct. 11, 2018

Oct. 11, 2018

§6.1 *In-script variants* is proposing to disallow <chillu-n, virama, rra>. However, as per Unicode (Standard Version 11.0.0 §12.9 page 506 table 12-38) <chillu-n, virama, rra> is the prescribed sequence for the form {chillu-n base, rra below-base}. Because of this conflict with Unicode, the sequence <chillu-n, virama, rra> should not be disallowed. Regards, Cibu

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[Comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18] A quick review of the Tamil proposal
by 梁海 Liang Hai Oct. 7, 2018

Oct. 7, 2018

- §3, “tholkəppɪyəm” and many other similar cases throughout the document: Use a common transliteration scheme (say, ISO 15919) consistently. - §3.1, “The image below shows how vaṭṭeḻuttu got transformed as Tamil letters.”: The introduction below Figure 1 says the image is about Tamil Brahmi diverging to Vaṭṭeḻuttu and Tamil. - §3.3.1, “It should also be noted that as per Tamil traditional grammar … in Tamil Traditional grammar.”: This is not a contrast between the Tamil traditional grammar and Unicode’s terminologies, but simply not clearly distinguishing a “consonantal sound/phoneme” and a “consonantal letter/grapheme” (Indic consonantal graphemes don’t necessarily represent pure consonantal phonemes) in common discussions. Eg, the sentence “The Unicode Consonant set of Tamil comprises the following characters” can be rephrased to “Tamil consonantal letters are encoded as the following Unicode characters”, if the authors want to make the distinction clear. - §3.3.1, Table 3: Oh c’mon, can we at least clean up the format so phonetic transcriptions are legible? - §3.3.2, Example 1 and 2: Use a clear format if character names are used, eg, <TAMIL LETTER KA, TAMIL SIGN VIRAMA, TAMIL LETTER SSA>. - §3.3.4, “The Visarga is also used in Tamil and represents a sound very close to /ḵ/”: “ḵ” is the ISO 15919 transliteration for ஃ, not a phonetic transcription. This setence effectively means “ஃ represents a sound very close to /ஃ/”. - §3.3.4, “To facilitate this modern usage apart from barring Visarga – Visarga combination …”: Is this saying the restriction of <…, visarga, visarga, …> is to be lifted in WLE? If yes, then there’s a conflict with the actual WLE rules in §7; if no, then since it’s perfectly valid to have <…, syllble final visarga, pre-consonant-modifier visarga, …> in spelling (eg, a native visarga-ending word followed by a visarga-begininng loanword), the restriction should be lifted and it’s inappropriate to include the rule 3 in §7. - §4.1.2.4, ’AU LENGTH MARK “ௗ” (U+0BD7) is a character in Tamil which has been added to Unicode and is very rarely used in Modern Tamil.’: This character is encoded in Unicode for technical reasons, and is part of ஔ and ௌ’s canonical decompositions (basically, because U+0BCC TAMIL VOWEL SIGN AU has its canonical decomposition as <U+0BC6 TAMIL VOWEL SIGN E, U+0BD7 TAMIL AU LENGTH MARK>, U+0BD7 is technically as much used as U+0BCC is), therefore the rationale of “very rarely used in Modern Tamil” is inappropriate although the recommendation of excluding it on the exclusion-principle-level is okay (the variation-level is probably better?). Instead probably state the character is not used in valid Tamil text that is in Unicode Normalization Form C (NFC). - §5.2, “for Tamil Language that NBGP has considered as given in 3.2”: Isn’t it stated in §3.2 that “they have not been considered in the present analysis”? - §5.2, Table 5: Should note the “Indic syllabic category” column is not about the Unicode character property of the same name. - §5.2.1, Table 6a: Are those “=” in the second column intended? - §5.5, “… in the form of variables”: These are not variables but notation. - §5.5.4, “3. A sequence of consonants …”: As it’s already stated in 5.5 that this section is about “Akshar formation”, it’s unclear why the authors are bringing phonetc syllables into the discussion. The so called “CHCHC” is just 3 separate akshars, <CH, CH, C>, although phonetically they belong to the same syllable. As Tamil doesn’t ever have pre-base stuctures written before (to the left of) a pulli-ed consonant letter, it doesn’t need to follow Devanagari’s practice and can safely simplify its akshar formation logic to allow only a single base consonant — the special cases śrī and kṣV should be discussed as special cases (because they’re really special, unlike anything else in Tamil). - The akshar formation pattern is thus simplified to `(C[M]|V)[X] | C[H]` (note V is just a special case of CM when C is zero), or expanded to `C[M][X] | V[X] | C[H]` for the sake of being more comprehensible. But note this analysis hasn’t taken the akshar-preceding visarga/aytham into consideration. - §6.1.3: My first impression is this should be “blocked” because <sa, virama, ra, vowel sign i> and <sha, virama, ra, vowel sign i> are indistinguishable, but I’m aware that I’m not familiar enough with the concept of “allocatable” vs “blocked”. If the intention is to explicitly allow the applicant to make both encodings aliases to each other (while still blocking other applicants from applying for the variant) so users can access the same domain no matter which encoding they use, then it’s good. - §6.3: Should note such cases are already eliminated by the NFC requirement of IDNA2008? - §6.4, Table 21: The bottom-right cell has a wrong rendering of the Malayalam text. - §6.5.2 Allocatable variants: See the comment above for 6.1.3. (I’m not confident about my understanding of “allocatable” and “blocked”…) - §7, “… by all the languages mentioned in section 3.2 …”: See the comment above for 5.2, “… for Tamil Language that NBGP has considered as given in 3.2”. - §7, “Below are the specific WLE rules”: See comment above for §3.3.4, “To facilitate this modern usage apart from barring Visarga – Visarga combination …”. Also, it’s unclear how the authors achieved this set of rules from §5.5’s analysis. Considering the consonant-modifier visarga, the akshar pattern should be `[X]C[M][X] | V[X] | [X]C[H]` (or even allowing X to precede V, if there’s attestation). - §11 Appendix A, Table 22: Based on the same level of similarity, the following pairs (and probably more) should also be considered: U+0B89 TAMIL LETTER U and U+0D09 MALAYALAM LETTER U, U+0BB5 TAMIL LETTER VA and U+0D35 MALAYALAM LETTER VA, U+0BB7 TAMIL LETTER SSA and U+0D37 MALAYALAM LETTER SSA. Best, 梁海 Liang Hai https://lianghai.github.io

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[Comments-malayalam-tamil-25sep18] Finalized Information for NBGP LGRs
by Pitinan Kooarmornpatana Oct. 4, 2018

Oct. 4, 2018

Comment submitted on behalf of Thin Zar Pyho, the Myanmar GP Chair. Regards, Pitinan ----------------------------------------------------------------- From: thinzar <thinzarlayster(a)gmail.com> Date: Thursday, October 4, 2018 at 19:13 To: Pitinan Kooarmornpatana <pitinan.koo(a)icann.org> Cc: "Y. May Oo" <yinmayoo(a)gmail.com>, Ye Zarni Aung <yezarniaung(a)gmail.com>, "Myint Myint Than (Ph. D" <drmmthan(a)gmail.com>, "Paing Khant (paingpeace)" <paing.peace(a)gmail.com>, Kaung Khant Zaw <kaungkhantc(a)gmail.com>, Thura Soe <trickleith(a)icloud.com>, UNT <ngwestar(a)gmail.com> Subject: [Ext] Finalized Information for NBGP LGRs Dear Pitinan, I would like to inform you that the NBGP LGRs document to submit to the public comments platform. It was checked and reviewed by Myanmar gp group and already agreed to submit to there. The comment document is as attached. Thank you so much your kindly supported. Sincerely Thin Zar Phyo Founder of Techno Zenith (IT Solution) info(a)technozenith.net<mailto:info@technozenith.net> www.technozenith.net [technozenith.net]<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.technozenith.net&d=…>

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