TIRUCHY: A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between the historic St Joseph’s college Tiruchy and Visual Media Technology (VMT) Krishnagiri to bring out the Jesuit priest Veeramamunivar’s ‘Sathuragarathi’ in Tamil Unicode format, here on Monday.
The MoU was signed by Rev Dr F.Andrew, principal and Dr T Nedunchezhian, associate professor of the Tamil department and the project’s principal investigator on behalf of St Joseph’s college and Mr Selvamurali, chairman, of VMT.
Dr T.Nedunchezhian and Selvamurali told newsmen later that as per the MoU, the VMT will provide the technical support and software data base for the project to digitize the great Tamil savant Veeramamunivar’s (Joseph’s Constantine Beschi)’s first Tamil Dictionary, ‘Sathuragarathi’.
All the Tamil words complied by the savant in 1732 would thus be uploaded into the proposed digital format under four headings, they said.
Dr Nedunchezhian said the digitization project would greatly help researchers and scholars in Tamil, English and other languages advance their research by using the search engine, as the work would be digitized and complied into an e-book in Unicode.
The college principal of Dr F.Andrew said he would support any research project, allowing the researchers to download the words without any cost.
With this project, Dr T Nedunchezhian said that more than one lakh Tamil words would join ‘Google Search Engine’ and tremendously increase the verbal wealth of the classical language Tamil. This project would be completed by the end of 2016-17 academic year.
The Central Institute of Indian Languages has also assured them financial assistance for this rare project, he added.
