HYDERABAD: The Unicode Consortium’s recent move to accept Tamil alphabets into Telugu Unicode block has sparked off a controversy, with many calling it an imposition of Tamil on Telugus. The move was proposed by a researcher Vinodh Rajan, who said that while transcribing Tamil religious texts into Telugu, it was especially hard to transcribe “Tamil consonants, namely ‘LLLA and RRA’”.
He proposed the complete import of these Tamil letters into Telugu Unicode block, which was accepted by the Unicode Consortium. In his letter to the Unicode Consortium, Rajan said, “Even though there is an Old Telugu equivalent of ‘LLLA’, it is virtually unknown to the modern populace outside the epigraphic domain.” He said the current equivalent of the Tamil ‘RRA’ in Telugu was not accurate and termed it a ‘trill’. Rajan cited the example of Latin orthographies (spellings) in Greek and Cyrillic that use Latin characters in Unicode and said the same should be followed here.
“Both these problems were resolved by the wholesale importation of these two Tamil consonants and treating them as if they were Telugu consonants. Using this hybrid orthography, the original Tamil phonetic realisation of the source text was appropriately preserved in the Telugu script without any loss,” the proposal statement read. On Wednesday, the organisation announced that the proposal was accepted for encoding in future version of the standard.
The move was not perceived positively by many. Speaking to Express, G Uma Maheswar Rao, Professor of Linguistics at University of Hyderabad, said, “There is already a similar consonant available introduced by me in 2010. This inclusion was unnecessary and the persons concerned with the Telugu Unicode were not informed before making this change.” Maheshwar Rao said this move could see many proposals of inclusions of characters not belonging to the same language.
“If I am transcribing something from Gurmukhi to Telugu, should I use Gurmukhi characters?” he asked. Many from Tamil Nadu expressed their disapproval on social media. “Dear @Unicode Stop imposing Tamil on Telugu People. Let them be unique with their identity. We Tamils don’t accept imposition on us and we don’t want to ride on others. Let everyone have their own Identity,” said Kasi on Twitter.
What is the Unicode Consortium?
The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit organisation that develops, extends and promotes the use of Unicode Standard and related globalisation standards. These standards specify the representation of text in modern software products and other standards.
What is a Unicode?
Since a computer fundamentally processes numbers, Unicode provides an unique number for every character no matter what language. Before the Unicode was invented, there were different systems called character encodings. However, they were not enough to cover all of the world’s languages. Unicode now
has been adopted by all modern software providers and it allows data to be transported through
different platforms without any corruption.