Dear Friends: I am glad to state that FASS International is organising a discourse on the subject "The Uniqueness of the Assamese Scripts - Its Historical Perspective" Date : Dec 21st, 2011 Time : 3 PM Venue : Chandra Kanta Handique Bhavan, Jorhat, Assam Appointed Speakers: Rajen Barua (USA) Azizul Haque (GHY) Invitations were also sent to several Universities. Note : Dibrugarh University already confirmed their participation. IIT GHY regretted their inability to attend but are sending their commnts and views on the topics. Local members from OXX will be present. Please pass the invitation to any interested members of the community. The following may be taken as a summary of the theme of the meeting: During the time of the 'Charyapadas' (7th to 12th century) and after, the languages as well as the scripts of Assamese, Bengali, Orissa and Maithili were the same. It is from this common root that later these languages have separated and developed their own separate scripts. So far as the Assamese and Bengali scripts are concerned, with the advent of the modern printing press in the nineteenth century, both the languages are using exactly the same script except for the two identifying letters of Ro and Wab-Bo. However, this common script is being called the 'Bengali' script in the National and international level. R.D Banerjee,s book written in 1919 "Origin of the Bengali Script' is a case in point which stated that Assamese does not have its own separate scripts. Indian national scholars also adopted this line thinking as reflected in the book by Dr. A. H Dani (published in 1961) which also stated that Assamese are using the Bengali scripts. Sadly enough, although Assamese are having various discussion within themselves about unique development of the Assamese scripts, there has not been proper response to the above challenges. As such so far as the uniqueness of the Assamese script is concerned, we are still on a feeble ground not because we don't have a unique and separate script but because there has been dearth of serious and in-depth study and discourses about the evolution and development of the Assamese scripts, especially in relation with the Bengali scripts. This has resulted in great doubts and confusion even among the Indian scholars. Of late, it has also created a problem in Unicode which has simply named simply named the common Assamese Bengali scripts as 'Bengali' scripts. Thus we have two problems to solve. One is to prove on the National level that Assamese has an independant and separate scripts which evolved in parallel with Bengali, Maitheili, Orissa etc. Two is to come up with some common agreements among the Assamese as to what may be termed as proper acceptable Assamese response to the Unicode. The discourse will try to come up with some agreements on the the above. Rajen Barua FASS Intl Station Jorhat _______________________________________________ assam mailing list assam@assamnet.org http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
