Add Tamil transliteration option

[epicfaace]

No description provided.

[akprasad]

This is difficult for two reasons:

1. The Tamil script loses a lot of information. More research needs to be done on the preferences of Tamil speakers reading in Tamil script: numeric subscripts, Grantha, etc.

2. See Add transliteration support for Bengali #12 for a technical problem related to Bengali, Tamil, and other scripts that lack a 1:1 mapping to Devanagari.

[epicfaace]

We might be able to use tamil_superscripted to keep that information. However, I do know that some Tamil speakers do prefer to use the regular Tamil script (even though it loses information) to read Sanskrit -- what exactly is the issue with losing information with a different script?

[epicfaace]

We might be able to use tamil_superscripted to keep that information. However, I do know that some Tamil speakers do prefer to use the regular Tamil script (even though it loses information) to read Sanskrit -- what exactly is the issue with losing information with a different script?

Oh I see -- if someone transliterates in a loop. In that case, should we perhaps keep hold of the original Devanagari in memory and always transliterate from that? (which would solve the loop problem)

[akprasad]

We might be able to use tamil_superscripted to keep that information. However, I do know that some Tamil speakers do prefer to use the regular Tamil script (even though it loses information) to read Sanskrit -- what exactly is the issue with losing information with a different script?

Oh I see -- if someone transliterates in a loop. In that case, should we perhaps keep hold of the original Devanagari in memory and always transliterate from that? (which would solve the loop problem)

Somewhat, but consider the following interaction:

1. User opens a page in Devanagari.
2. JS records the original Devanagari.
3. User transliterates to Bengali.
4. User clicks on a word, which shows the पदच्छेद view.
5. User transliterates to Tamil.

This in an edge case, of course -- I mean to illustrate only that it's not quite as simple as storing a snapshot.

I think the proper long-term fix is to have a JS app that can intelligently transliterate while retaining interaction state without losing information, but that's a big project and a lot of complexity for a minor feature. I think there needs to be much more impetus for moving to Vue, etc. before we take the plunge.

Or, an alternative that came up on Discord is to just do all of this on the backend since client-side transliteration is not especially useful to most.

See here and below.

[epicfaace]

Ok, closing this for now! Thanks for the pointer to the Discord discussion.

[akprasad]

Whoops, went a little fast and thought this was an issue. See #431.

We're thinking about using the server-side Aksharamukha library to transliterate. @epicfaace are you interested in working on this?

[epicfaace]

Ah, yes, sure.