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Part of the Unicode Consortium's work is assigning code points to characters and determining what characters to include, but that is far from all they do.They also publish standards in the form of Technical Reports (http://www.unicode.org/reports/index.html). These cover a wide range of topics from how to normalize characters (are ℮ and e equivalent even though they are not the same?) to How to handle internationalized domain names.A sub-project of the Unicode Consortium is the CLDR project (http://cldr.unicode.org/index) which provides information on individual locales around the world. Things like number formatting (German swaps the "." and ","), date formatting (UK & US swap the day and month), and sorting (What comes first, "u" or "ü"?).

Why two Tamil alphabets are added in Telugu Unicode?Before getting into the main answer and required action points for every linguists and language lovers (who respect not only their own language and script but also respect all the independent Indic languages and their unique scripts) - i would like to appraise what is 'Unicode Consortium' and their main objectives.‘Imposition of Tamil on Telugu’: New inclusion in Unicode sparks controversy(this is going to be bit longer and request all to go through with patience)What is 'Unicode Consortium' and what they do:(as per their own website)The Unicode Consortium is an independent non-profit, organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards which specify the representation of text in modern software products and other standards.The Unicode Standard provides a unique number for every character, no matter what platform, device, application or language. It has been adopted by all modern software providers and now allows data to be transported through many different platforms, devices and applications without corruption.Support of Unicode forms the foundation for the representation of languages and symbols in all major operating systems, search engines, browsers, laptops, and smart phones—plus the Internet and World Wide Web (URLs, HTML, XML, CSS, JSON, etc.).The emergence of the Unicode Standard and the availability of tools supporting it are among the most significant recent global software technology trends.What is the main objective of UC:Unicode gives higher priority to ensuring utility for the future than to preserving past antiquities. Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text (e.g. in the union of all newspapers and magazines printed in the world in 1988), whose number is undoubtedly far below 2 to the power of14= 16,384. Beyond those modern-use characters, all others may be defined to be obsolete or rare; these are better candidates for private-use registration than for congesting the public list of generally useful Unicodes.Now let us look into the current controversial issue of inclusion 'two Tamil consonants' into 'Telugu Unicode':What are those two Tamil Consonants'?The two consonants areLLLA (zh - ழ) - Unicode U+0BB4RRA (ற) - Unicode U+0BB1(and these were proposed to be placed beside their exact telugu equivalent at positions U+0C5B & 5C)Are there no Grapheme's in Telugu to represent these specific Phoneme sounds? Are they in current usage or were disbanded ?Telugu language has got wide variety of Grapheme's to support various PhonemesLa (ల - U+OC32), LLA (ళ - U+OC33) and also LLLA ( Unicode Character 'TELUGU LETTER LLLA' (U+0C34) )Telugu equivalent LLLA - U+0C34.pdfRa (ర - U+OC30), RRA (ఱ - U+OC31) and also additional RRRA ( Unicode Character 'TELUGU LETTER RRRA' (U+0C5A) )Telugu equivalent RRRA - U+0C5A.pdfThese two special alphabet characters were in use in very ancient telugu inscriptions from the times of Salankayana's, Telugu Renati Chola's, Vishnukundina and Eastern Chalukya's period of 6th - 10th Century AD.However, during the time of first of ‘Poet Triad' , the Great Nannayya Bhattaraka (who is famous initiator author of 'Andhra Mahabharatamu'), who was also responsible for 'Standardization of Telugu alphabets, grammar ' and to make it have 'Phonemic Orthography' during the period of 'Vengi Chalukya king the Raja Raja Narendra. After this, these two alphabet characters were no longer appeared in Telugu literary works. In fact, majority of general Telugu people don't even remember the existence of these two (LLLA and RRRA) characters anymore.This is not uncommon during evolutionary development of 'linguistic Script' of any language. In Telugu language as well several characters (including above two alphabets) have gone obsolete (example's ruu (ౠ), alu (ఌ), tsa/tza (ౘ), dza (ౙ), valapula gilaka - ೯) and were no longer in popular use & have become obsolete over a long period of time in order attain a near perfect 'Phonemic Orthography' (we Telugu's are proud to proclaim that “what exactly we Write is what we exactly Read” - “ఏది రాస్తామో అదే చదువుతాము”).Which alphabets are removed from Telugu script?Many of these alphabets are no longer used (in either popular or standard current Telugu anymore) but still being captured as part of 'Telugu Unicode' chart. Even though they are being captured as part of the 'Standard Telugu Unicode', at best they can be described as an unwanted 'Ancient Vestigial Burden'.In the wake of this situation, any body can easily guess what would be the fate of the 'two Tamil consonant codes that were forcefully and unthoughtfully included into the Telugu unicode chart.Telugu Unicode.pdfSo, who has made this new proposal to make the original 'Tamil consonants' be included in the 'Telugu Unicode'? And how their current use being justified?One, Dr. Vinodh Rajan, who is a doctorate in Computer sciences and currently working as a linguistic code developer and as a post-doctoral researcher at University of Hamburg, Germany happened to make a proposal on 14th April 2020 to the 'Unicode Consortium' with his own justifications based on their use in a couple of rare religious texts.20119-forcing LLA RRA as - telugu-letters.pdfAnd within a fortnight, the ‘Unicode organization' has agreed to include these 'two original Tamil consonants' into the 'Telugu Unicode' chart without even discussing with any of the linguistic stakeholders, language experts, respective Telugu/Indian government unicode board members or even any popular publishers of Telugu literature (hard print or even software based publishing houses).‘Imposition of Tamil on Telugu’: New inclusion in Unicode sparks controversyWhile, Dr Vinodh Rajan tried justifying by providing couple of recent (19th & 20th Century) Sri Vaisnavaite Tamil religious texts translated into Telugu wherein these two 'Tamil consonants' in their originality were used in the Telugu transliteration work while maintaning the purity of 'Tamil Phoneme' sounds around LLLA and RRA.However, the mere couple of 'Sri Vaisnavaite' religious texts got published by an ‘over ambitious' Vaisnavaite Religious Sects with the help of couple of Madras (Tamilnadu) based publishing houses who agreed to print these two specific 'Tamil consonants' as part of Telugu transliteration work. In addition, except for the repeat publishing of those couple of Vaisnavaite religious texts, there won't be any broader use of these two 'Tamil consonants' in any of the other literary works of Telugu. While he defended the maintenance of the originality of 'Tamil Phonemes' in the Telugu transliteration work, he is not bothered about disturbance of 'Phonemic Orthography' of translated work into Telugu language. The very objective of translation into Telugu should be that for a common native telugu reader the work should be legibly readable. Moreover, the typographical errors mentioned may be because of the fact that 'Madras based Telugu publisher's may not be completely in sync with the 'Standarad Telugu'. In the meantime, these kind of transliteration of Vaisnavaite religious texts would be just for the benefit of a minority population of Vaisnavaite temple Priests and religious minority who may be able to speak Tamil but no longer able to read Tamil (for the purpose correct pronunciation of such texts during their rendition in religious temple customs).Thus, such work's definitely not for the benefit of majority of general Telugu speaking population. Moreover, even the exact Telugu equivalents were not in use for the last eleven centuries in any standard popular telugu works.This is purely an unjustified and unthoughtful 'inclusion of Tamil consonants' into Telugu Unicode chart. In addition, it is against the very said objective of ‘Unicode Consortium', namely, “giving high priority of ensuring utility for the future than to preserving past antiquities. Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text” (e.g. in the union of all newspapers and magazines printed in the Telugu language).So, these two 'Tamil consonants' along with their ‘exact Telugu equivalents' would at best remain as an “Ancient Vestigial Burden” on Telugu Unicode chart with duplicate double entries of same codes into two independent language scripts.For all the above mentioned reasons, we oppose this unjustified move and earnestly appeal to the esteemed 'Unicode organisation’ to undo this uncalled for 'inclusion of the two Tamil consonant alphabet codes' into Telugu Unicode chart.What would be the general implications of this?This kind of contentious inclusion can very well become a precedence for many such unjustified 'Unicode' entries across several closely related or even unrelated language translation works.If the reason for such justification is the 'maintenance of phoneme purity of any language alphabets into another language transliteration work, then it would lead to duplication of specific Unicodes across several languages. For ex. In Tamil, only one grapheme is used to represent four different phoneme's (ka, ca, pa), redundancy of ta and tha - causing confusion of inter usage, absence of consonants to represent ba (pa used instead), ha (ca, ka/ga used instead) - making it one of the most vulnerable language script system for future potential corruptions.Action points for linguists and language/script lovers:👇 A template letter to communicate with 'Unicode Consortium Editors' is being presented here and I request every one (all linguists and language/script lovers of India and the World to send email to these below mentioned email id's to express our protest to Unicode consortium (ఈ కింది ఈ-మెయిల్ అడ్రస్ లకు పంపించండి)[email protected]@unicode.org;[email protected];[email protected];______________________________________________–———————————–——————————————Dear Indic - Unicode Editor(s),Season's Greetings.This is in connection with the recent inclusion of 'two Tamil consonant alphabets' into Telugu language Unicode.We, herewith would like to oppose this unjustified move and earnestly appeal your esteemed organisation to undo the uncalled for 'inclusion of two non-native Tamil consonant alphabet unicodes' into Telugu language.We would like to bring to your attention some of the historical facts and unique linguistic traits of Telugu language:1. Telugu is the most widely spoken among the Dravidian family of languages with a total world wide 'Telugu speaking population' of more than 120 million people.2. Telugu is the fourth (4th) most widely spoken language in India and fifteenth (15th) most widely spoken language in the world. It is the official language of two states of India, namely Andhra Pradesh & Telangana and also a major recognised language in the union territories of Pondicherry and Andaman - Nicobar islands. Just to highlight a couple of most popular persons of Telugu linguistic nativity in the world in the recent present times are Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO) and late PV Narasimha Rao (former Prime Minister of India).3. Telugu is an ancient language with the first writing traced back to around 2000 years. it has received the Classical language status in India along with other classical languages like Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada.4. Telugu language script belongs to 'abugida class' of Indian neo-bramhi script family closely related to language scripts of Kannada and Sinhalese.5. Apart from transcribing of Telugu language, the 'Telugu Script' is also actively used to transcribe many other Indian languages like Gondi, Koya-Kui, Konda, Kuvi, Kolami, Banjara, Savara apart from Sanskrit and Prakrit.6. The 'Telugu Script' is also widely used to transliterate many of the world's popular religious texts like 'The Bible of Christianity', 'Quoran of Islam', Hindu Saivaite, Vaishnavaite, Veerasaiva, vedantic philosophical texts and Bhagavatha puranic texts from Sanskrit, Tamil and Kannada, 'Guru Granth' sahib of Sikhism, Tripitakas of Buddhists liturgical texts in Pali Jaina texts of Pali-Prakrit, Magadhi-Artha Magadhi languages.7. As you may know that 'Telugu is a beautifully mellifluous among all the Dravidian languages with many unique traits like 'Vowel Ending', 'Vowel Harmony' and near perfect 'Phonemic Orthography'. For these reasons, Telugu language became the most popular and highly used language for the musical renditions of 'classical carnatic music' that is highly popular in entire southern India. It has got a meticulously defined grammatical system and rich linguistic literature attached to it.8. Telugu has already got a comprehensive array of alphabets (16 vowels, 41 consonants and 3 additional vowel modifiers). It is a language with perfectly defined grammar and having perfect orthography between 'graphemes' (written symbols) and 'phonemes' (spoken sounds).9. 'Telugu Script' has already got a comprehensive and combined linguistic characters of both 'inherited common Dravidian ' and the converged Indo-Aryan linguistic codes. Thus, Telugu has already got the highest number of linguistic code points among many of the Indian Bramhic scripts.10. The 'Telugu Unicode '(The Unicode block: U+0C00–U+0C7F) is already comprehensive to support both the 'native linguistic works' and also fully supports the transliteration of any other 'non-native language works.Hence, the 'Telugu script' doesn't require any kind of new characters from other languages.We strongly object this premature and unthoughtful inclusion of 'non-native' alphabet codes from another language (here two consonants from Tamil), resulting in not only a 'grammatically unfit inclusion' but also disturbing the unique trait of 'Phonemic Orthography' associated with Telugu language.The direct lifting of any non-native linguistic codes of any other language and their inclusion into 'Telugu Unicode chart' subverts and compromises the very idea of having unique coding characters for any and every independent language scripts.So, the 'Unicode organization should completely avoid such inclusion of one language codepoints into the Unicode charts of another language. Just because of the fact that the 'Unicode consortium' is an international, private and independent organization, they need to be responsible and sensible enough to show maturity to respect unique nature of each individual language codes.For any such 'support modifications' the Unicode officials should be consulting the 'consortium of Telugu language experts' as part of a proper procedure - rather than acting at the behest of 'non-native linguistic coders' in an illogical, irrational manner which is also lacking common sense.In any case, the original telugu equivalents for the characters LLLA and RRA are already included / there in the 'Telugu Unicode' with entries of U+0C34 (LLLA), U+0C31 (ఱ - RRA) and also U+0C5A (RRRA). Even though these two native alphabets (LLLA and RRRA) were used in couple of historical telugu epigraphs of 6th century AD, they are of very limited current usage except for the transliteration of couple of Sri Vaisnavaite religious texts from Tamil into Telugu language.In addition, it is against the very said objective of ‘Unicode Consortium', namely, “giving high priority of ensuring utility for the future than to preserving past antiquities.Moreover, any such inclusion of non-native alphabets into Telugu unicode will defeat the very idea of their legible readability to facilitate their utility for native Telugu language users.So, inclusion of 'Tamil consonant codes' into 'Telugu Unicodes' will not serve the 'primary purpose' but also disturbs the idea of having unique independent language script Unicodes. Eventhough, they are being captured as part of the 'Standard Telugu Unicode', at best they can be described as an unwanted 'Ancient Vestigial Burden'.This kind of inclusions result in unicode duplications and double entry of specific Unicodes into two independent language script systems causing confusion to their users.So, we earnestly request you to immediately undo the recent inclusion of 'two non-native consonants' into Telugu Unicode and initiate a discussion with 'Telugu language experts' for an early resolution of this current controversy.References:https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/telangana/2020/may/02/imposition-of-tamil-on-telugu-new-inclusion-in-unicode-sparks-controversy-2138087.html2) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language3) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_script4) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_grammar5) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_literature6) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ms5kRfpA1KrKvm_nevm4i2Aiu-AHTg3D/view?usp=drivesdk7) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pVV1bcd21WaSTYgunTsYSqiniZXEQJi8/view?usp=drivesdkhttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1pL8uVRES74x-LJNBf8Im1rzWGobokazq/view?usp=drivesdkThanking you,Sincerely yours,______________________________________________Give as much publicity among your your contacts and language lovers and ask them to post it on multiple social media forums and make it a major discussion point among various forums.Thanking You.

Unicode is a universal text character encoding. Text character encodings are ways of representing text for computers and digital devices. Unicode is the most common method of representing text in the world today. So it is used pretty nearly everywhere text is used. Email. Web sites. On your computer for its internal representations of text. Smartphones. You name it.Basically every bit of text and most common symbols you see are abstract characters, which are represented in Unicode.Various other ways of representing text exist, but they have drawbacks, such as only covering limited numbers of languages, or not being extensible for future use. Any scheme that only covers some languages needs to be used in conjunction with other schemes that cover other languages, involving re-using the same codes for different characters. This is why we used to have so many problems interchanging text across devices… a problem which has been greatly reduced thanks to increased use of Unicode.The formal answer from the Unicode Consortium.