On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Guntupalli Karunakar <karuna...@indlinux.org> wrote:
> The request Swarup has currently can only be solved by > - either a hack, have new character, which looks like 09F0 > (Assamese RA), but semantics like Devanagari BA, or Bengali VA. In my humble opinion, this is a gesture that is simply not only anti-history and anti-evolution, but, in a very crucial way makes language, the best social product that civilization has achieved into something that reflects personal whims and eccentricities. I think language does not work that way. Anything goes in language, but, not just anything. It has got to be filtered through millions of popular usage over a considerable length of time. That is, in other words, socially filtered. A lot of things can be said about this, but, reasonably speaking, none of them goes in favor of such a move. So many references and cannons can be referred to here, but, I think, a small monograph by Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay on 'The Origin of Bengali Script', University of Calcutta, Kolkata, 1919 -- an extremely authoritative piece of text on Bengali scripts and all, will be sufficient. For many years this is not available in print, but, luckily for us, it is available in archive.org, in DJVU PDF and other formats. In fact, please let me clutter this mail with tidbits from this highly respected monograph that will show the very pointlessness of the task that our friend Guntupalli Karunakar has so appropriately summarized in the three lines that I have quoted above. Those three lines do really include all the variables that are important for this discussion: a hack, Bengali BA or VA, Devanagari or Nagari versions of them, and Assamese ra. In fact, I will humbly want to add another variables to this list, that is, the Oriya versions of BA or VA, to read this discussion in the light of the wisdom of one of the all time great scholars on Bengali script. Let us quote a few lines from this monograph. From Chapter I: << ... It has become possible to show, that proto-Bengali forms were evolved in the North-East, long before the invasion of Northern India, by the Nagari alphabet of the South- West, and that Nagari has had very little influence upon the development of the Bengali script. ... >> This points towards the crucial bedrock that held the birth of Bengali script -- "evolved in North-East". And it also points towards the nature of the relation of the early Bengali script with the Nagari or Devnagari script that was invading North India, coming from the South-West. Let us read again. << ... After the Muhammadan conquest, the Western variety gradually spread itself over the whole of South-Bihar or Magadha, and the use of the Eastern variety was confined to the western limits of Bengal proper. ... The Gaya-Prapitamahesvara temple inscription of V. S. 1257 and the Umga Hill inscription of Bhairavendra (V. S. 1496=1439 A.D.) show that Nagari had entirely displaced the Eastern variety in Magadha. ... >> Here is another important point I would want to highlight -- writing in Magadha flourished in Nagari script -- and shows the total displacement of Bengali script, and Magadha gets outside the area where Bengali script operates. So, this obviously points towards lack of any kinship between Devnagari and Bengali scripts. At best, they are competitors. Please do not get angry with me. I think, the long chain of discussion in this thread deserves a bit more of quoting from this monograph -- let me map my variables, the kinship patterns of Bengali script, and then, I am coming back to my point. << ... In the north the snowy mountains formed the northern limit. But in north-east Bengali script was adopted in Assam ... ... In the east the Bengali script was also being used in Sylhet, ... In the south the Bengali script was used throughout Orissa. We find the proto-Bengali script ... at Bhuvaneswar. ... The modern cursive Oriya script was developed out of the Bengali after the 14th century A.D. like the modern Assamese. ... >> So, as we see, the kinship milestones of Bengali script are already there: Assamese and Oriya. In fact, the lineage is something like Assamese --> Bengali --> Oriya. And the word 'invasion' marks the relationship of Devnagari towards these scripts. Now, let us go back to the three lines of our learned friend, Karunakar. If a hack really takes place that makes a character (struck-out-Ba) available to the Bengali script, which was never historically there, that project will not just be anachronistic, it will be in violation of all the social logic that go into language, the most social one of all our inheritances. Not just Bengali, all the other scripts in the lineage chain, like Assamese, from where it came, or like Oriya, what it became, are scripts that never contained a dual Ba/Va like Devnagari does. The character that looks like the Nagari Ba is actually ra, as our friends have already pointed out. And now this hack wants to emulate Devnagari script the relation of which towards Assamese/Bengali/Oriya scripts we have already described. I think, even if that hack is done, and that hack gets really popular among larger sections of the Bengali mass in the coming decades, what will give this hack a legitimacy in getting accounted as a language thing, that will be really unfortunate for those people using Bengali script who care for the history that made Bengali Bengali. I am sorry for this gigantic mail: but, I think it was necessary to clear some viewpoints that we people, who are not technical at all like the developers are, but voracious users of the Bengali script, do share through our decades-long history of using the language and the script. -- দাশ das http://ddts.randomink.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. 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