Extended Tamil script
Extended-Tamil script (or originally Tamil-Grantha script) refers to the script used to write the Tamil language before the 20th century Tamil purist movement.[1] The script is a descendant of Pallava-Grantha script which extensively developed during the Middle Tamil period to write Middle-Tamil.
The Modern Tamil script is a subset of Tamil-Grantha alphabet, retaining only the 18 consonants taken from Tolkāppiyam-based Old Tamil which generally was written Vatteluttu script or Tamil-Brahmi. Tamil-Grantha has 36 consonants, hence covering all Indic consonants like Malayalam script. At a later period in the 20th century, the Modern-Tamil standard allowed a few additional consonants {ஜ,ஷ,ஸ,ஹ} from Tamil-Grantha into its alphabet.
Some proposed to reunify Grantha and Modern-Tamil;[2][3] however, the proposal triggered discontent by some.[4][5] Considering the sensitivity involved, it was determined that the two scripts should not be unified, except for the numerals.[6]
References
- ^ K. Kailasapathy (1979), The Tamil Purist Movement: A Re-evaluation, Social Scientist, Vol. 7, No. 10, pp. 23-27
- ^ Sharma, Shriramana. (2010a). Proposal to encode characters for Extended Tamil.
- ^ Sharma, Shriramana. (2010b). Follow-up to Extended Tamil proposal L2/10-256R.
- ^ Eraiyarasan, B. (2011). Dr. B.Eraiyarasan’s comments on Tamil Unicode And Grantham proposals.
- ^ Nalankilli, Thanjai. (2018). Attempts to "Pollute" Tamil Unicode with Grantha Characters. Tamil Tribune. Retrieved 13 May 2019 from https://web.archive.org/web/20200306030655/http://www.tamiltribune.com/18/1201.html
- ^ Government of India. (2010). Unicode Standard for Grantha Script.