Note to recruiters

Note to recruiters: We are quite aware that recruiters, interviewers, VCs and other professionals generally perform a Google Search before they interview someone, take a pitch from someone, et cetera. Please keep in mind that not everything put on the Internet must align directly to one's future career and/or one's future product portfolio. Sometimes, people do put things on the Internet just because. Just because. It may be out of their personal interests, which may have nothing to do with their professional interests. Or it may be for some other reason. Recruiters seem to have this wrong-headed notion that if somebody is not signalling their interests in a certain area online, then that means that they are not interested in that area at all. It is worth pointing out that economics pretty much underlies the areas of marketing, strategy, operations and finance. And this blog is about economics. With metta, let us. by all means, be reflective about this whole business of business. Also, see our post on "The Multi-faceted Identity Problem".

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Enter stage left, Arun

So my buddy Arun Viswanath has a new blog on Heritage Speakers of Tamil. The URL is here. Check it out!

Continuing the conversation on the Tamil language: I was asked the following question on a mailing list earlier today:

can you clarify the motivation behind this? Why is there a need to 'modernize the Tamil script'?

Here is my response.

-+-
I am asking two fundamental questions :
(a) why are there so many illiterates in India?
(b) what can be done to make Tamil more approachable for both poor people and
heritage speakers?

Target audience
===========
I started off targeting this at heritage speakers (see my friend Arun Viswanath's new blog : http://heritagespeaker.wordpress.com/). <stuff deleted>

Why this new system?
================
My answer to the question may surprise you. Part of the reason for the number of illiterates in India is the complexity of Hindi and Tamil. One problem with both Hindi and Tamil is that there are too many characters. Furthermore, the situation in Tamil is complicated by the fact that the Tamil language is diglossic (it is also agglutinative, which may make it difficult for speakers of other languages in the region - such as Hindi and Marathi - to easily pick it up.

A paper I was recently reading makes much the same case. Here are the first two sentences from the paper.

==

There is a growing awareness among some Arab education specialists that the low levels of educational achievement and high illiteracy (and low literacy) rates in most Arab countries are directly related to the complexities of the standard Arabic language used in formal schooling and in non-formal education. These complexities mostly relate to the diglossic situation of the Arabic language and make reading in Arabic an overly arduous process.

==

I believe the same is true for Tamil.

==
There is a growing awareness among some (so far, just me, actually) who have studied the Tamil language that the low levels of educational achievement and high illiteracy (and low literacy) rates in most Tamil Nadu districtis are directly related to the complexities of the standard Tamil language used in formal schooling and in non-formal education. These complexities mostly relate to the diglossic situation of the Tamil language and make reading in Tamil an overly arduous process.

==

Solution
======
My solution is simple : get rid of the problem altogether. Introduce a system of
writing Tamil that uses fewer characters and requires fewer things to learn. In
my system, you only have to learn the set of characters on this here page :

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://wizzyschool.com/images/language/tamil\
%2520alphabet.gif&imgrefurl=http://wizzyschool.com/language/alphabets%2520of%252\
0the%2520world.php&h=362&w=430&sz=21&tbnid=gd-slersBcTDYM:&tbnh=85&tbnw=101&zoom\
=1&usg=__IIJ1_w3NhYaF0VMflDh2TRc9KYs=&docid=bUAqDUahhcuFJM&sa=X&ei=oUHKUamvMua_i\
gKnrICYCA&ved=0CDoQ9QEwAw&dur=359

Just one more thing : the horizontal bar on top (this was introduced as a tribute to Panini) is an additional character to learn. You don't need the two characters at the end, so a requirement of a total of 35 characters to learn. Which already approaches English's requirement of 26.

Benefits
======
Value proposition/Who would benefit? Poor people, mostly

- poor children often find the task of learning all the characters in Tamil
daunting. (Hawaiian manages with just 13 letters - 5 vowels, 8 consonants) and
many don't even succeed.
- poor adults who don't use the language on a daily basis often lose touch with
the set of characters in the language.

The reason for the connection/commonality
===============================
What is common to the heritage speakers as well as the poor children in Tamil
Nadu is that they both want to learn but find it hard to.

The punchline
=============
This system takes 5 minutes to learn. Cost = small. Benefit = potentially not small. So, why not do it?

Post-script:
========
I propose to simplify Hindi in exactly the same way.

- use the 'halant' for all consonants which have a vowel following them and use the actual vowel character instead. (i.e. instead of writing it as 'ru' (in Hindi), you would write it as 'r' (in Hindi) + 'halant' + the character for the vowel in question 'u')