Do we need Tamil characters in the Telugu Alphabet?
Lets protest the adding of Tamil alphabet into Telugu.
Recently the Unicode consortium tweeted that it would be adding two characters from Tamil alphabet to the Telugu alphabet Unicode chart. The tweet saw no reaction from any Telugu person or institution, but there was a huge protest from hundreds of Tamilians on this issue within hours of the post.
The gist of all these tweets from Tamilians was more or less the same -
- 80 million Tamil people object to the imposition of these characters to the Telugu alphabet.
- The proposed LLLA and RRRA are unique to Tamil and cannot be shared with any other language.
On 14th April one Mr. Vinodh Rajan, a Tamilian himself has proposed to the Unicode Consortium that two Tamil letters, ழ(LLLA) and ற்ற(RRRA) should be included in the Telugu alphabet Unicode chart as these are used in some Telugu religious books as a mandate. Citing some old Tamil texts in Telugu scripts with the said characters as is. Mr. Rajan succeeded in convincing the Unicode Consortium to add these two letters into the Telugu alphabet with no voice from Telugus. Telugus are not even aware of such change being made to their script.
The huge noise made by Tamils on this issue on social media, particularly Twitter, is understandable that they see it as some third person modifying the alphabet of a language without even considering the voice of the native speakers of that language.
Any native speaker cannot entertain this and it’s a highly condemnable act.
This proposal itself is foolish in the sense that it relies on some Vaishnavite text from the 1920s and 1930s, which has adapted to the modern Telugu alphabet in recent times. Even if I have to include Tamil characters in the said text, I can simply switch to Tamil keyboard, type the required characters and switch back to Telugu.
Interpret the proposal in your own way, it’s like, everytime I write my name in Telugu followed by say my educational qualification in English(as a common practice) which is B.Tech, it’s like adding B, T, e, c, h into Telugu alphabet. How absurd does it sound. Exactly that’s what is happening.
An individual cannot have an agency to bring out such changes. Agency should lie with the literary organisation or government in the interest of the native speakers. The proposal for any change should come from the government. There should be a formal protocol, when effecting such changes. This is a good time that we have an accountable person or institution who can be contacted by the Unicode team. That means the government should entrust the activities accordingly. Lack of a competent language development authority is clearly being felt. Representation at such language related fora is a must for the Government. Only then will it be able to protect and preserve the interests of people.
The most interesting thing is both ழ and ற்ற have been found not unique to Tamil but part of all Dravidian languages with slight variation in pronunciations. In 2012, Suresh Kolichala et al., proposed the Unicode code points for ழ and ற்ற equivalents of Telugu. So, the above proposal is inappropriate, as it adds the same character with different form, which can be well modified at font level and need not require any changes in Unicode.
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