Basically, there was no market to begin with - very few people used a physical Tamil keyboard to begin with, and most people couldn’t afford a desktop, let alone a laptop. Such a keyboard would have needed a little bit of logic in the operating system to g0 along with it to support the input method style, and that was more than the “market” of Tamil keyboard purchasers could support. In hindsight, in 2004 when that paper was published, no one had seen iPhone-style smartphones with their virtual on-screen keyboards that can be designed entirely in software, so the prospect of redesigning physical keyboards for Tamil had too many factors to make it unviable. The idea ultimately fell on deaf ears and ignored by the community and therefore quickly abandoned by its backers. Its inclusion in the conference proceedings itself was tenuous and only the result of a struggle. Once explained, it made sense, but I wasn’t the one involved in pushing the idea. Ironically, even though I was listed as co-author on this paper on designing a better Tamil keyboard presented at the 2004 Tamil Internet Conference, I understood the idea only after it was explained to me. I further explained more clearly in the 2017 Tamil Internet Conference talk on the need for phoneme level analysis to enable NLP applications.
Phonemes have come up for me a lot, from the original clj-thamil project in 2014 that led to writing programs in languages other than English (as explained in the 2015 Clojure/West talk).
What is the landscape for dictionary datasets?.Why would dictionary data be useful in some of these cases?.What are some of the user-facing problems in internationalization (i18n) for languages with these aspects?.How do we distinguish the linguistic terms carefully from the Unicode / computing terms?.What are abugida scripts and agglutinative grammars?.
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