[Indic-computing-users] LINK: Debate over IndicComputing issue...

[Frederick N. <fr...@by...>]

SOME INTERESTING feedback to an article earlier published on
www.linuxjournal.com. The charge of having overlooked some very important
aspects is real -- scrambling around for this kind of information, scattered
as it is all over the place, is prone to such handicaps. Needless to say, I
don't have any biases whatever against Tamil. 

It is clear that excellent work is going on, on the Tamil front. (Learnt of
the Mandrake 9.0 achievement subsequent to writing this article.) But, it
also seems that the overseas Tamil diaspora (in Singapore, Canada, etc) is
playing an active role in these initiatives, and their work might not be
sufficiently known of/networked with the rest of the IndicComputing
landscape. 

Am I right on this? A number of queries to various mailing lists brought in
coverage for many languages, but not so much on Tamil. Your comments are
welcome. -FN
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Re: Indian Language Solutions for GNU/Linux (Score: 1) by Terry (terry_wendt
AT yahoo DOT com) on Sunday, October 20, 2002

There are probably over 380 million people who speak english as their native
language, if you count the USA, the UK, Australia, and english speaking
Canada. Just a comment in response to the article stating there are only 366
million hindi speakers.  I naively assummed that the majority of India would
speak the same language.

[ Reply to This ]

Re: english speakers and hindi speakers by Anonymous on Thursday, October
31, 2002

Re: Indian Language Solutions for GNU/Linux (Score: 0) by Anonymous on
Monday, October 21, 2002

Visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tamilinix/ for the latest developments
in Linux inTamil. Incidently Tamil is the first Indic language to be
supported 100% out of the box in the latest Mandrake 9.0. see the
screenshots here for tamil in Linux.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tamilinix/files/misc/screenshots/Mandrake/
here is a follow up on this in tamilinix mailing list.

From:  "Vasee Vaseeharan" 
Date:  Mon Oct 21, 2002  3:39 am

Subject:  Re: Linux Journal covers Indian language Linux

Yes, I am very concerned that Tamil Linux seems to have been ignored
completely in that article. Had Noronha bothered to investigage Indic Linux
properly, especially in some of the areas Read the rest of this comment... 

Re: Indian Language Solutions for GNU/Linux by Anonymous on Thursday,
October 31, 2002 Re: Indian Language Solutions for GNU/Linux (Score: 1) by
ramv on Monday, October 21, 2002 (User Info | Send a Message)
http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/ "Microsoft's Windows XP has Indian language
support based on the current Unicode version (3.x) and hence suffers from
all the problems of Unicode-based solutions: inability to represent all the
characters of some Indian languages and awkwardness in text processing. "
What does this mean??. Which characters cannot be represented in Unicode??
What kind of awkwardness in text processing?? I have been working in Unicode
since 1999 and yet to see an Indic characters that cannot be represented.
"Satish Babu (sb...@in...), a free software enthusiast and vice president
of InApp, an Indo-US software company dealing with free and open-source
solutions, points to other problems, such as collation (sorting) order co
Read the rest of this comment... [ Reply to This ] 

I am sceptical about this (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, October 24,
2002 I am basically from kerala and Malayalam is my mother tongue. I am very
proficient in that language also. I have utmost respect to any one
associated with all these works. But let me tell you some thing very
frankly. I dont think people WANT malayalam version of softwares very much.
Even though their mother tongue is Malayalam, they are not particular on
using malayalam. Most of them ( especially the young guys who use computer)
knows english and they like english MORE THAN malayalam(beleive it or not !
). Most of the kids going to school are going in ENGLISH medium schools and
many of them even can't read or write malayalam properly. I doubt whether
they would ever need or use any piece of software in malayalam. Even in the
government level , most of the do Read the rest of this comment... [ Reply
to This ] 

Re: I am sceptical about this by Anonymous on Friday, October 25, 2002 Re:
Indian Language Solutions for GNU/Linux (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Saturday,
October 26, 2002 It is unfortunate that Noronha has overlooked the Acharya
project that has been going on for more than a decade at IIT, Madras.

It deals with a large number of languages, Indian and otherwise.  It
provides extensive APIs for various programming languages and is available
for Linux, Windows, and, in some cases, other platforms. It features a text
to speech module for the visually impaired. Best of all, the software is
free and is in use by a number of individuals and organizations.

URL: http://acharya.iitm.ac.in
Thanks.

Ajit Natarajan
[ Reply to This ]

The major achievements are (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Monday, October 28,
2002

Further to the crossposting from tamilinix group and some excellent works
reported at http://www.tamillinux.org , it seems that achievements by the
Tamil language are totally ignored in this report.  This casts aspersions on
the journalist's integrity.  

How else can one read; International efforts also are helping India. Yudit,
the free Unicode text editor, now offers support for three South Indian
languages: Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu While the previous posting says
tamil was supported in yudit much early. What is the necessity to miss only
tamil among the four s.indian languages? [ Reply to This ] Re: The major
achievements are by Anonymous on Thursday, November 07, 2002