MILESTONES IN TAMIL BASED COMPUTING 2005: 2013:2014

  

MARCHING AHEAD IN  TAMIL-BASED COMPUTING

N.Nandhivarman

 “The blending of the language and software disciplines led to the emergence of new areas like ‘Language Engineering’, ‘Internationalization and Localization’ and ‘Tamil-based Computing’ says S.Kuppuswami Dean of the Ramanujam School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences of Pondicherry University. The Government of India had declared Tamil as classical language and the evolution in computer technology with increased applications necessitated the adaptation of Tamil in computers. Internet is a mostly used by English knowing peoples in view of the content and presentation being in English. Since Internet has to reach more people the need of the hour is Tamil-based computing. “ The unique and unparalleled role of two academicians of Pondicherry University in Tamil based computing has not been recognized by Tamil scholars” opined President of Anna Foundation C.P.Thirunavukarasu former M.P

S.Kuppuswami and V.Prasanna Venkatesan of Pondicherry University developed a prototype of Tamil Computer in the year 1996. Having this prototype as base Government of Tamilnadu had taken initiatives on standardization of keyboard, coding schemes and technical words for realizing the Tamil Computer and constituted a committee The committee broadly divided the issues related to Tamil Computer into language and computer based issues. The language-based issues mainly focuses on the language to be adopted in computer and the changes in the language elements like character composition, character set, grammar etc. It was decided that there was no change required in the character set and composition. Standardizing the Tamil grammar is still a progressing work.

“The next one is the computer system related issues like keyboard layouts, character coding scheme, domain naming etc. In order to work with different Tamil software, the users have to learn different keyboard layouts and complicate the keying-in process. This is due to the non-availability of standard Tamil keyboard layout. In order to select and standardize a Tamil keyboard layout, the committee decided to categorize the existing Tamil keyboard layouts and analyze them. Tamil keyboard layouts proposed by the various software developers and researchers have been collected and categorized into four groups” explains V.Prasanna Venkatesan. 

Keyboard layouts based on the phonemes and frequencies of usage of Tamil characters are classified as Phonetic keyboard layouts. Layouts which follow the Tamil typewriter keyboard are classified as Typewriter-like keyboard layouts. In Romanized keyboard layouts mapping of the Tamil characters to the corresponding English characters is done on transliteration basis. The keyboard layouts which do not fall under the above categories are grouped as others.

 

An extensive analysis was carried out in three phases on the Tamil keyboard layouts to determine their efficiency for keying-in of Tamil texts selected from various Tamil literatures of different periods. S.Kuppuswami and V.Prasanna Venkatesan have jointly developed benchmarking software to analyze the Tamil keyboard layouts and recommended the results to Government of Tamilnadu, which led to steps being taken for release of the standardized Tamil keyboard layout for Tamil software development.

 

The UNICODE consortium did standardizing the character-coding scheme but it was commented for the limitations. To over come this hurdle the duo designed a coding scheme for Tamil based on sorting, storage, and memory and performance constraints. In addition jointly they have developed many Tamil software for the Tamil usage and users. While two scholars from Pondicherry University have shown the way to Tamil computing there is little interaction between them and Tamil scholars of Pondicherry.

But at the same time Pondicherry’s Tamil scholars are realizing that they should not be left behind and recently an effort is being made to introduce them to netizens. And in the forefront of this endeavor is Rasa. Thiagarasan. While the print media nowadays is promoting modern verse an Ezine launched before ten months from Pondicherry had encouraged Tamil writers to compose poems strictly following the grammatical rules and meter. “Since Marabu kavithaigal have become a rare species we decided to promote and preserve them in net world” says, Rasa Thiagarajan editor of the Tamil ezine Pudhucherry that can be viewed at www.pudhucherry.com. 

Entirely new breeds of writers have come up in the net world. They started in writing blogs and blossomed into fully talented writers of the day. Especially women could assert their presence by writing in ezines. Puthiya Madhavai from Mumbai, Madhumitha from Chennai, Shailaja from Bangalore, Nirmala Suresh of Kolkatta, Jayanthi Shankar from Singapore are few of the feminine writers who have left their imprint.

 

Intense debate on Tamil development and Tamil oriented discussions are going on in yahoo groups such as Marathadi, Tamil Ulagam, Santha Vasantham, Raayar Kapi Klup. The group santha vasantham is debating Marabu illakiyam, which means heritage poetry or traditional poetry.

 

Professor Anantha Narayanan of Bio Chemistry department University of Toronto Canada is a scholar known to world by ezines and e-writings. These trendsetters have now generated interest among the Tamil scholars of Pondicherry. Pulavar Se.Ramalingan brought such scholars under one umbrella. The President of Pudhuvai Tamil Sangam Mannar Mannan launched the first ever e-zine from Pondicherry which had come out for 10 months and given space for Pondicherry's Tamil scholars to record their inner voice. “We are e-publishing this journal on a non-remunerative basis says. Se.Ramalingan who edits the ezine. The ezine Pudhucherry contains links to various other ezines and tries to introduce everything to everyone. The life histories of Tamil Scholars like Maraimalai Adigal, Deveneya Paavanar, Mahakavi Bharathiar, U.Ve. Swaminatha Iyer finds place in this ezine. The pages of Tamil Virtual University, lists of electronic texts of Project Madurai, Online Tamil lexicon of University of Cologne are given links. The valuable compilation of Anthology of Malaysian Tamil Poetry 1887-1987 is brought to light. The news of the world’s first Tamil SMS launched in Singapore by Oli, Singapore’s Tamil Radio on 15 th January 2005 with lyricist Vairamuthu participating indicates the direction in which Tamil is heading for. “Sellinam” the Tamil name for mobile software developed by Muthu Nedumaran whose Murasu Email had earlier established him as single man contributing to Open source software is also mentioned in its pages. “ Though Computer Scholars and Tamil Scholars of Pondicherry are working in isolation with no interconnectivity they are establishing that Pondicherry leads” says Dr. Ira.Thirumurugan of the Tamil Development Independent Initiative.

[courtesy: New Indian Express :  3^rd  September 2005]