Is Unicode for Indian Languages meaningless then ?
The answer is certainly No. The main purpose of the Unicode is to transport information across computer systems. As of today, Unicode is reasonably adequate to do this job since it does provide for representing text at the syllable level though not in the fixed size units (Bytes). Applications dealing with Indian Languages will have to include a special layer which transforms Unicode text into a more meaningful layer for linguistic or text processing purposes. The point to keep in mind is that the seven bit ASCII based representation for most World language serves both purposes well i.e., not only are text strings transferable across systems, but linguistic processing is consistent with the seven bit representation . It so happens that the phonetic nature of our Indian Languages has necessitated a different representation for linguistic analysis. With majority of the Languages of the World, which use a relatively small set of symbols to represent the letters of their alphabet, 8 bit (o
