Attn: Unicode Inc worker Kent Karlsson
C/o Magda Danish
Sr Administrative Director
Unicode Inc
<kent.karlsso...@telia.com>,
<v-mag...@microsoft.com>,
<arch...@mail-archive.com>,
Neither Assam Government nor Assam Literary Society has asked Unicode
Inc to encode Assamese stuff.
Why did it encode Assamese stuff?
Can you reply back with detailed information on what prompt Unicode
Inc to encode Assamese stuff as "Bengali"?
Thank you in advance for providing this information,
Tulasi
PS: Your email thread appended herewith as reference
From: Kent Karlsson <kent.karlsso...@telia.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 5:44 PM
Subject: Re: Continue:Glaring mistake in the code list for South Asian
Script
To: delex r <del...@indiatimes.com>, unicode@unicode.org
Den 2011-09-10 00:53, skrev "delex r" <del...@indiatimes.com>:
> I figure out that Unicode has not addressed the sovereignty issues of a
> language
Which, I daresay, is irrelevant from a *character* encoding
perspective.
> while trying to devise an ASCII like encoding system for almost all
> the characters and symbols used on earth. I am continuing with my observation
> of the glaring mistake done by Unicode by naming a South Asian Script as
> łBengali˛. Here I would like to give certain information that I think will be
> of some help for Unicode in its endeavour to faithfully represent a Universal
> Character encoding standard truer to even micro-facts.
>
> India is believed to have at least 1652 mother tongues out of which only 22
One list of languages in India is given in
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=IN
(I did not count the number of entries)
> are recognized by the Indian Constitution as official languages for
> administrative communication among local governments and to the citizens. And
> the constitution has not explicitly recognized any official script. As Unicode
> has listed the languages and scripts, the Indian Constitution has also listed
Unicode does not list any languages at all. Ok, the CLDR subproject
copies a
list of language codes from the IANA language subtag registry, which
(in a
complex manner) takes its language codes from (among others) the ISO
639-3
registry, which largely is in sync with Ethnologue (as in the list
above);
but I guess that is not what you referred to.
> the official languages ( In its 8th schedule). The first entry in that list is
> the Assamese language. Assamese is a sovereign language with its own grammar
Which I don't think is in dispute at all.
> and łscript˛ that contains some unique characters that you will not find in
> any of the scripts so far discovered by Unicode. At least 30 million people
Unicode (at this stage) does not do any "discovery". Unicode and ISO/
IEC
10646 is driven by applications (proposals) to encode characters (and
define
properties of characters).
> call it the łAssamese Script˛ and if provided with computers and internet
If you want to disunify the Bengali script (and characters) from
Assamese,
you need to show, in a proposal document, that they really are
different
scripts, and should not be unified as just different uses of the same
script.
> connection can bomb the Unicode e-mail address with confirmations. These
Hmm, an email bombing threat... I'm sure Sarasvati can find a way to
block
those (or we may all simply file them away as spam).
> characters are, I repeat, the one that is given a Hexcode 09F0 and the other
> with 09F1 by this universal character encoding system but unfortunat!
> ely has described both as łBengali˛ Ra etc. etc. I donąt know who has advised
> Unicode to use the tag łBengali˛ to name the block that includes these two
> characters.
>
> If you are not an Indian then just google an image of an Indian Currency note.
> There on one side of the note you will find a box inside which the value of
> the currency note is written in words in at least 15 scripts of official
> Indian languages.( I donąt know why it is not 22). At the top , the script is
> Assamese as Assamese is the first officially recognized language (script?) .
> Next below it you will find almost similar shapes. That is in Bengali. India
> officially recognises the distinction between these two scripts which although
> shaped similar but sounds very different at many points. And the standard
Minor font differences is not a reason for disunification. Different
pronunciations of the same letters is not a reason for disunification
either. Just think of how many different ways Latin letters (and
letter
combinations) are pronounced in different languages (x, j, h, v, w,
f, ...;
even "a" gets different pronunciation in British English vs. US
English,
and that is within the same language...; and most orthographies aren't
very accurately phonetic anyway, with quite a bit of varying
(contextual
and dialectal) pronunciation for the letters).
> assamese alphabet set has extra characters which are never bengali just like
> London is never in Germany.
There are 8 London in the USA, two in Canada, one in Kiribati, ... ;-)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_(disambiguation))
> Coming again to the Hexcodes 09F0 (Raw) and 09F1 (wabo). Both have nothing
> Bengali in them and interestingly 09F1 ( sounds WO or WA when used within
> words) has even nothing ŚRaą sound in it. Thus you know, with actual Bengali
> alphabet set one canąt write anything to produce the sound łWatt˛ as in James
> Watt and instead need to combine three alphabets but even then only to sound
> like ł OOYAT ł in Bengali itself.
Yes, English has a rather peculiar pronunciation for the letter
W... ;-)
Several languages will pronounce Watt (without changing the spelling)
as
Vatt, and regard that as a normal pronunciation of Watt.
> Therefore Unicode must consider terming the block range as łAssamese˛ which
> will faithfully describe the block range with 09F0 and 09F1 in it and replace
> all tags ł Bengali˛ with łAssamese˛ in the code descriptions and vice versa .
> London is in England and Berlin is in Germany. You just canąt bring London
> into Germany and then say England is in Germany. You canąt live with a lie or
> wrong too long.
See above re. London. ;-) As for Berlin: see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_(disambiguation)...
(I still fail to see how this would be analogous in any way whatsoever
to
your quest.)
Yes, I have responded with a quite large dose of irony. Dryer and to
the
point responses by others seem to have passes unnoticed.
/Kent K
