Exactly: Tamil does not use strokes (it is not ideographic, is not built from radicals) or a bar (like e.g. Devanagari does); or, as far as I can remember, even ligatures. The characters are rounded (this is supposedly a consequence of the original writing medium when the Tamil syllabary was developed) rather than being built upon vertical lines descending from a horizontal bar like most Indic scripts. And from what little I've seen (I do not read the language), Tamil typesetters are not shy about using the Latin alphabet when necessary. Patrick Rourke [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Antoine Leca" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Unicode List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 12:39 PM Subject: Re: Chemistry in chinesse (Only in chinesse?) [ iso-8859-1 ] Erik Garrés escribo/wrote: > > * ESPAÑOL * > *********** > ¿sólo en chino sucede esto, o es en todos los idiomas que utilizan trazos > (Tamil, Japonés, etc), alfabeto cirílico (como el Ruso), alfabeto griego, > en todos los idiomas que no usan el alfabeto latino ? Tamiz no utiliza trazos (en el sentido normal de esta palabra). Es silábico y no alfabético, pero los signos son parecido a los del alfabeto latino, no se "contruian" como ideogramas. El uso normal es el del alfabeto latino por los símbolos químicos, el uso de los caracteres propios del alfabeto es singular. Quizá lo mes probable sera el cirílico, pero no he visto evidencia. > * ENGLISH * > *********** > Does it happens only on Chinesse, or it happens on all languages where use > strokes (Tamil, Japannes, etc.), Cyrillic alphabet (like Russian), Greek > alphabet, all non-latin alphabet based languages ? Tamil do not use strokes (in the common sense of this word). This is a syllabic script, not an alphabetical, but the signs are much alike those of the Latin alphabet, they are not "built" as ideograms do. The common use is to write chemical symbols with the Latin letters, the use of the letters of the indigenous alphabet would be exceptional. I think the best bet would be Cyrillic, but I never saw that. Antoine
