Unicode Demystified

Tamil

The scripts we've looked at so far—Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, and Oriya—form the North Brahmi group of scripts. Next, we turn to the South Brahmi scripts, which descend from the ancient Brahmi script along a line that diverged fairly early from the North Brahmi scripts. This group includes the Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Sinhala scripts. With the exception of Sinhala, the main languages these scripts are used to write belong to the Dravidian language group, which is completely unrelated to the Indic language group to which the others belong—their adoption of the same basic writing system as the Indic languages stems from their geographic proximity, and they have some differences from the North Brahmi scripts that ...