Gender-neutrality and L337speak in Malayalam!

A couple of Malayalam musings.

Call me Anglicized, but one thing that I often find jarring in Malayalam is the paucity of gender neutral terms in common usage. One of these days I'll sit down and collect some examples and come up with outrageous suggestions to "fix" them. Or, hopefully, someone will point out that a process of fixing is already underway.

[Update: if India gets a woman president, would she be called "rashtrapati"? (For the record, and for what it's worth, I won't say it translates to "the husband of the notion", but rather to "the Master/Lord of the nation.")]

Now for the Malayalam l33tspeak. I'm not too keen on it myself, but I'm afraid I've already seen this being used quite a bit in the Malayalam digitalscape (though mostly unintentionally). If you can read Malayalam, you'd agree that the digits one through nine (൧൨൩൪൫൬൭൮൯) bear an uncanny resemblance to certain characters (e.g. ഫ വ മ്പ ര്‌ ദ്ര ന്ന െ വൃ ന്‌). Of course there's a little more you could do using English characters and digits. (*shudder*)