Attn: Unicode Inc worker Ken Whistler
C/o Magda Danish
Sr Administrative Director
Unicode Inc
<kenw @ sybase.com>,
<[email protected]>,
Neither Assam Government nor Assam Literary Society has asked Unicode
Inc to encode Assamese stuff.
Why did Unicode Inc encode Assamese stuff?
Can you reply back with detailed information on what prompt Unicode
Inc to encode Assamese stuff as "Bengali"?
Thank you in advance for providing this information,
Tulasi
PS: Your email thread appended herewith as reference
From: Ken Whistler <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 1:53 PM
Subject: Re: Continue: Glaring Mistake in the Code List of South Asian
Script, Reply to Daug Ewell and Others
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
On 9/12/2011 9:13 AM, Philippe Verdy wrote:
Well, wasn't the ISCII standard naming the script "Bengali"? It
also gave the name "Assamese", but was it a synonym or did it require
a separate codepage switching code ?
They were separate. Annex A of ISCII 1991 shows Bengali ("BNG") and
Assamese ("ASM") in separate columns. *Every* character in those two
columns is completely identical, except the entries (no surprise) in
the "r" row and the "v" row. And in Annex D, the listing of Inscript
keyboards, there is one keyboard overlay for Bengali and one for
Assamese. These again are completely
identical, except for the "B" key (where the "v" goes) and the "J" key
(where the "r") goes.
Why? Well, I presume the Bureau of Indian Standards ran into the same
linguistic political buzzsaw that you have seen rehearsed on this
thread.
It may be interesting to reread the ISCII standard from which the
UCS encoding of the Indian scripts came from...
Yes. it is interesting reading. I recommend it sometime.
Ultimately, however, it is not pertinent to the question here. The
distinction between
"Bengali" and "Assamese" is a matter of linguistic politics. It is not
a matter of
script or character encoding.
--Ken
