[UA-discuss] Assamese

[Asmus Freytag]

All,

it might be useful if the UA community where more aware of the 
continuing efforts to request a disunification of Assamese from Bengali 
on a script basis. The forwarded message contains a link to the proposal 
so you can read along. (The proposal calls for the "inclusion of the 
Assamese script" in Unicode/ISO 10646  which sidesteps the fact that the 
script currently encoded in Unicode, despite the name "Bengali" is in 
fact covering both the Bengali and Assamese languages).

As noted by the person commenting on it on the Unicode list, the issues 
cited are all common for cases where more than one language shares the 
same script.

If you look in the proposal document, you will see that the list of 
characters are not really distinct from each other; so it's not the case 
that the languages use different forms of the same basic letters (unlike 
the European languages when historically German would use other letter 
shapes than French).

The consequences of splitting the script for IDNs would be pretty 
drastic, as every single label would have to be a blocked variant of 
some label in the "other" script; worse would be the issue that users 
seeing a label in print would (in many cases) not be able to tell which 
script to use to enter it.

Even for regular text, the situation would be chaotic, as you could type 
either language in either script and it would largely "look" OK, but 
sort differently. Add to that, the issue that decades of existing data 
will continue to exist in what would then be the "wrong" script.

What is of concern here is not that there is a high likelihood of 
Unicode accepting a proposal like that, but the level of activity in the 
community being geared up in support of it.

Let's hope it doesn't ever get there,

A./

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	L2/18-181
Date: 	Wed, 16 May 2018 13:46:22 -0700
From: 	Doug Ewell via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
Reply-To: 	Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org>
To: 	Unicode Mailing List <unicode at unicode.org>


http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18181-n4947-assamese.pdf

This is a fascinating proposal to disunify the Assamese script from
Bengali on the following bases:

1. The identity of Assamese as a script distinct from Bengali is in
jeopardy.

2. Collation is different between the Assamese and Bengali languages,
and code point order should reflect collation order.

3. Keyboard design is more difficult because consonants like ক্ষ
are encoded as conjunct forms instead of atomic characters.

4. The use of a single encoded script to write two languages forces
users to use language identifiers to identify the language.

5. Transliteration of Assamese into a different script is problematic
because letters have different phonological value in Assamese and
Bengali.

It will be interesting to see where this proposal goes. Given that all
or most of these issues can be claimed for English, French, German,
Spanish, and hundreds of other languages written in the Latin script, if
the Assamese proposal is approved we can expect similar disunification
of the Latin script into language-specific alphabets in the future.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org


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