Hi,
I guess these are some of the real problems that come up while we try to think of transliteration.
Now that you have pointed out even I think that "sha, shha" are better representatives of our language than "cha, chha". I didnt think of that maybe because I was tring to follow the Devnagari scheme as far as possible or mayb becuase of my own stupidity.I think "sha and shha" work much better....
As far as typing a lot of consonants together I think history has proven it very impractical. For example the written ancient egyptian, demotic, modern arabic and hebrew use no vowels. But when their texts are transliterated into English an 'a' or 'e' is often used in appropiate places so that they can be easily read and typed. But I guess there is precious little we can do to solve the problem of typing in consecutive vowels/consonants. It is because the english alphabet consists of 26 character while Assamese consists of 51 character...almost double and on top that we have the juktakshars. It is a numerical imbalance.
I guess the juktakshars can be taken care of....A proram can be written interprets two consecutive consonants without any vowels between them as a juktakshar and replaces it with its corresponding font. But as far as the regualar alphabet goes what we can do, maybe, is provide a floating (always on the top) software, not very unlike the windows charmap.exe, which displays the 51 characters with certain hotkeys. It can probably do 2 things.. (1) on clicking on the letters it will print the character to the active word processor (2) show the hot keys etc to the keyboard typist.... Anyone who is really interested should be able to pick up the skill in a few days....
What I guess the problem is people are too lazy to learn the little that is required. But I guess once transliterated stuff makes it appearance on a regular basis and the software is a little user friendly, people will start using it at a larger scale because in the end, every Assamese wants to talk in the language he grew up with....
yours Syamanta Saikia
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From: J Kalita <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CC: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Assam] Transliteration Of Assamese Sounds Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 15:02:46 -0600 (MDT)
Hi,
These are some of the problems I see with your approach and others proposed,
including mine.
1) People don't like to type two of the same vowels one after the other. For most people who are used to typing in English, typing "aa" or "ii" seems unnatural. Also, typing a capital letter such as "A" in the middle of a word seems unnatural. I am not sure what the solution is except some compromise has to be made. Others have proposed typing several consonants one after the other without intervening vowels. If I have to choose, I like typing two vowels together than typing several consonants together. Typing several consonants together makes the language look harsh also when people read the Roman transliteration. Assamese is not a harsh language and transliteration should show it.
2) You use "ca" and "cha" for prothom-sa and ditiya-sa. Why "c" and
not "s"? Most Assamese people never pronounce "cha" or "chha" like
Hindi or Bengali speakers do. We are happy saying "sa" for both
prothom and ditiya-sa not differentiating between the two.
I am willing to make the
compromise of having "sa" and "sha" because there are two different
characters in Assamese alphabet and it will help us keep the spelling right.
3) You use "x" for the three xa's. I like that. We have a special sound in Assamese and the transliteration should show it. Because of the fact that you use "x" based on phonetic reasons, you should use "sa" and "sha" (in (2) above) instead of "ca" and "cha".
4) Most people who want to type in Assamese on the computer and find it
difficult, find it so because we have to keep on searching for
what key to type. So, although not ideal, the best current solution
I see now is to a) allow people to type in Roman transliteration,
b) then allow people to choose or highlight
the Assamese region, and
c) then allow a menu choice to "transliterate into Assamese"
or something like that.
If someone could do this with a program like Microsoft Word, I am
sure there will be many users. So, the scheme must be unambiguous
and a program must be able to transliterate back and forth between
Assamese and Roman fonts. Maybe, someone creative, artistic, efficient
and smart like Rabin Deka can help us in this effort!
5) I would like to see some of our discussions on this net and elsewhere happen in Assamese. We can do that with a good Roman transliteration scheme. (That is why I was a bit disappointed when during our annual conferences such as Assam 2003, every bit of discussion is done in English!) Otherwise, Assamese as a language doesn't have a great future in the Internet and subsequent ages.
6) aami axamiyaate likhibar abhyaax karaa usit. nijar bhaxatut jadi nijar kathabur prakaax kariba nuwaaru, tente i bar dukhar kathaa.
I would be perfectly happy to write in transliterated Assamese if people were willing to read what I write. However, as I started typing the previous paragraph, I started thinking I would prefer using "o" instead of "a" in several places such as "koraa", "nijor", "jodi", "kothaabur", "prokaax","koriba", "dukhor", etc. The spellings with "o" seem more phonetic than those with "a". So, what do we do? Saurav suggested using "o" and sometimes it makes sense, but it messes up a good transliteration scheme.
ei bixoye aalusonaa kori kibaa etaa poddhoti thik kori lobo paarile aamaar bhaaxaatur baabe mongol hobo. aamaaru mongol hobo.
Jugal Kalita
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