The current orthography of Malayalam is a refined variety of the Arya Eluttu that evolved from the Pallava-Grantha writing system. Even after undergoing two reformations, the current writing system of Malayalam incorporates many complexities.
The Malayalam script is an alpha syllabary consisting of 51 letters plus other characters including diacritic marks, and is one of the largest writing systems in India.
Simplified orthography is an extended version of the script used in “Pacha Malayalam” literature. This dissolves the existing aspirate letters and promotes the usage of distinct letters for dental na and alveolar na.
Advantageous
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Reduces the complexity of the script, and decreases the total number of characters down to just the necessary ones.
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Loan letters are only necessary when representation of foreign loan words or names occur. Hence, the number of base letters in Malayalam can be reduced to 31.
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Reduction in the number of conjunct letters.
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This simplification does not demand any changes to the existing resources available for Malayalam language, nor does it create any issues to those resources.
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The simplification calls for deletion of Sanskrit loans with aspirates and other complexities; this does not require changing their spelling. Instead, native Malayalam words or Tadbhavas will replace them.
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The simplified script will reduce the complexity involved in language technology, and thus increase usage and reliability of such resources.
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A simplified writing system increases the usability of the script on all platforms. With this reform, keyboard layouts will become much more user-friendly and will drastically increase its popularity among the youth who are accustomed to the ease of using Latin-based keyboard layouts.
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The use of language in computers will increase with simplified script, as it reduces the complexity of glyph rendering and long, hard-to-pronounce derivations for computer terminology.
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