Re: Perhaps all of India should adopt one script

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
mb wrote:

If I can't find an agreed-upon convention that deals with the matter,
how do I write them?

You don't.

What if I want to write to someone else who uses both words? Looking
them up in dictionaries, I can find one of the meanings only in a Tamil
dictionary and the other only in a Malayalam dictionary.

The purpose is not to reproduce someone's sounds but to communicate.

Very well; suppose I want to communicate using these words without
necessarily using their sounds. How do I do that?

(a) Why can't the two words be homographs? They are disambiguated by
context.

There is already a case of homographs in one language that are not
homophones and can be distinguished by context. Spoken Malayalam has
different classes of words with different phonologies. In morpheme
/un.d./, the following retroflex is allowed to change the vowel in a
certain class of morphemes (most commonly to [On.d.] or [Yn.d.]) but
phonology must remain conservative in another class of morphemes, so
there's another morpheme /un.d./ pronounced [Un.d.] which is a
homograph but not a homophone. The two classes of words seem to be
treated by the savants among the natives as having different
phonologies rather than different phonemes.

(b) You claimed that they "have the same phonemes" yet they are
pronounced differently and mean different things. One or the other of
those two claims is incorrect.

Coming to Tamil where Dravidian morphemes are not divided into two
classes like above, it too has the first and second morpheme /un.d./
but their pronunciations are not allowed to differ; they are both
[Un.d.]. To facilitate discussion of the first /un.d./ in Malayalam and
Tamil, let's call them und and ynd after their pronunciations and
forget about the second /un.d./ which has the same meaning in both
languages.

While und and ynd have a large area of overlap in meaning, they also
have an area of non-overlap. While und is normally used only in Tamil
and ynd normally used only in Malayalam, there are dialects of Tamil
and Malayalam that use both und and ynd. I once came up with a pun on
the two /un.d.aa irikkuhiradakku pagaram un.d.aa irukku/ [Yn.d.A
irkr@dYk:Y pah@*O~ Un.d.A irkY] for the amusement of a Tamilian who had
both ynd and und.

Now, what would be the way for us to write ynd and und to (1) each
other and (2) within our respective dialect groups? As homographs or
not? Should we write ynd the same way for (1) those within our dialect
group and for (2) those without or should we write them differently
when we are writing to groups 1 & 2?

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