[Comments-kannada-oriya-telugu-08aug18] A quick review of the Odia proposal

Subhashish Panigrahi psubhashish at gmail.com
Mon Oct 8 13:18:50 UTC 2018


Odia/Oriya:

Largely agree with Liang. Additionally, it feels like a majority portion of
the content is lifted from Wikipedia without correcting anything based on
verification. Liang has already flagged the Gujarati part. It is weird to
see that researchers are referring to Wikipedia rather than referring to
primary and and secondary sources. Wikipedia itself refers to tertiary and
above sources and at times contains factual inconsistencies.

3.4:
It is important to note that "ଵ" (U+0B35) is a burrowed character from
Sanskrit that was inserted in the Unicode chart. Apart from any alleged
publications that might have been created by the authors, the character has
not seen the day of light in any authentic source (e.g. news publication by
noted publication houses, text books, other published books from noted
publishers, etc.). What is the point in pushing the agenda of a few people
that is not largely accepted by the community.

3.8
It's laughable and there is no logic whatsoever to explain why nukta is
added “କ” (U+0B15),“ଖ” (U+0B16), “ଗ” (U+0B17), “ଚ” (U+0B1A), “ଜ” (U+0B1C),
and “ଫ” (U+0B2B). There is no reference or any published resources to show
the need or historical use of these. Simply put, the researchers should
have gone beyond Wikipedia to find if the historical use actually exist as
these characters not only mimic the efforts of those standardized the
language and the script on the basis of which the Indian state of Odisha
was formed in 1936. If a script would evolve, it would evolve based on a
dialog between the experts and the larger community. Insertion of nukta to
these characters are done in this document in a monolithic manner without
any consensus, historical reference and to promote a new trend one of the
researchers for Odia is promoting on social media. This should not be
treated as allegation but a serious flag as these serious flaws will
tarnish the hard work of ICANN.

Nukta in “ଚ” (U+0B1A), however, is visible in the Karani script which is
another historical variation/predecessor of the current Odia script but has
to be treated as a different script. The reason for nukta in “ଚ” (U+0B1A)
was for a different purpose and bringing it back for another purpose is
gross manipulation.

Strongly support Liang's point about "ଡ଼" and "ଢ଼" as those two characters
are regarded as treasure troves of Odia script. The very name of the
language "ଓଡ଼ିଆ" and the geographical place — the state of Odisha (ଓଡ଼ିଶା)
contains these characters. "ଡ଼" and "ଢ଼" are supposed to be treated as
characters rather than variations of "ଡ" and "ଢ" as the usage case for the
former two are more than the latter.

Subhashish


On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 4:20 PM 梁海 Liang Hai <lianghai at gmail.com> wrote:

> - 2, “oḍiā”: Not an accurate transliteration as it doesn’t distinguish
> ଓଡିଆ and ଓଡ଼ିଆ.
>
> - 3, “known in Unicode as Oriya”: It’s known also as “Oriya” everywhere.
>
> - 3, “Oriya script seems to be a variant of Devanāgarī … mahājani
> (trader's) script.”: Seriously? Is this copied from the Gujarati proposal?
> Odia doesn’t seem to be a variant of Devanagari to anyone who knows the
> existence of the Bangla script.
>
> - 3.1, “The diagram belowshows the major stages in the evolution of Oriya
> attesting its late divergence from Devanāgarī.”: Are the authors trying to
> ignore/deny Odia’s relationship with Bangla?
>
> - 3.4: Why the IPA of ଯ is missing? The whole set of IPA transcriptions is
> apparently inaccurate as it doesn’t reflect even some of the Odia
> language’s typical features (eg, the rounded schwa). Actually the proposal
> doesn’t need IPA transcriptions for every letter because it’s text encoding
> being discussed. Lossless transliterations are much more useful. The whole
> Table 1 can be removed.
>
> - 3.6: Authors are not using accurate transliterations.
>
> - 3.7, “Half form of consonants (pre-base form)”: Pre-base forms don’t
> seem relevant to Odia discussions.
>
> - 3.8, “… to show that words having these consonants with a nukta are to
> be pronounced in the Perso-Arabic style.”: Inaccurate. At least the usage
> of nukta on dda and ddha is not related to Perso-Arabic words.
>
> - 3.10, “/ãala/”: Either use a phonetic transcription (then the first
> syllable’s vowel is probably not /a/ and the consonant is not /l/), or use
> transliteration: am̐ḷā. It’s not helpful and is only confusing if an
> inaccurate transcription/transliteration is provide. Drop it or correct it.
>
> - 3.11: Rendering failure of the second example (saṁkhyā).
>
> - 3.12, Table 3: Clean up the duplicated dotted circles. Why is vocalic rr
> excluded but vocalic l adn vocalic ll are included? Be consistent with the
> discussions in later sections.
>
> - 5.2 and 5.2.1: Doesn’t U+0B35 ORIYA LETTER VA fall into “4.1.2.4 No Rare
> and Obsolete Characters“? Why is U+0B57 ORIYA AU LENGTH MARK excluded but
> U+0B56 ORIYA AI LENGTH MARK is included?
>
> - 6.1, “… there are no characters/character sequences which can be created
> by using the Oriya characters permitted as per the [MSR] and look
> identical.”: **FALSE**. Odia has a seriously problem of confusables because
> of multiple ways of encoding the signs of ba and ya. Many fonts (eg,
> Nirmala UI) allow both <virama, U+0B2F ya> and <virama, U+0B5F yya> to form
> the post-base form of ya; and allow all of <virama, U+0B2C ba>, <virama,
> U+0B35 va>, and <virama, U+0B71 wa> to form the blow-base forms of ba. To
> the very least, this is the problem the propasal should’ve captured, and
> the NBGP failed. And these variants probably need to be proposed as
> “allocatable”. Also, Odia does have other natural (not because of technical
> issues like the problem aforementioned) ambiguities that need to be
> addressed (note many of them are stylistic and depend on what font is used
> to render text), see [
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odia_alphabet#Ambiguities](
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odia_alphabet#Ambiguities)
>
> - 7: For other reviewers’ reference: `C[N][M][B|D|X] | V[B|D|X] | C[N]H`
>
> Best,
> 梁海 Liang Hai
> https://lianghai.github.io
>
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