Attn: Unicode Inc worker Martin J. Dürst
C/o Magda Danish
Sr Administrative Director
Unicode Inc
<duerst @ it.aoyama.ac.jp>,
<[email protected]>,
Neither Assam Government nor Assam Literary Society has asked Unicode
Inc to 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,
Tulas
PS: Your email thread appended herewith as reference
From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 6:14 PM
Subject: Re: continue: Glaring Mistake in nomenclature
To: delex r <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Hello Delex,
On 2011/09/14 15:55, delex r wrote:
The “Dark age of Assamese language” ran for about 37 years in
this region when it was tried to kill a the language by vested
interests with the help of British Political powers imposing Bengali
as medium of instruction in school and colleges and for all official
purpose.
That sounds like a very sad story, but a long time ago. Please think
about how you can affect the future, because you can't change the
past.
I think now naming the script as “ Bengali” that too by stealing
two unique letters from the Assamese alphabet list and coloring them
with Bengali hue is part of that notorious linguistic invasion.
No, these letters clearly belong to the same script. That the script
was named "Bengali" in the standard may be unfortunate, in particular
from your viewpoint, but as far as the official standards are
concerned, it can't be changed (as many others already have told you).
Please note that you (and anybody else) can call this script whatever
you think is most appropriate.
What I think you might be able to ask for is to have some annotation
for the two letters in question, in the same way as e.g. the Arabic
block has lots of annotations for what language uses which character
for those characters that are not part of the base Arabic alphabet.
But why don't you look out for things you can change, and that would
be much more productive to help your goal of furthering the Assamese
language. For example:
a) Check what the problems (if any) there are with technologies such
as CSS for styling,... to be able to use Assamese without problems on
the Internet and the Web and elsewhere. (If you find something, please
direct any comments to the relevant mailing lists, and not to this
one.)
b) (this one is easier and requires more manpower): Contribute to the
Assamese language by publishing content, contributing to Web sites
such as Wikipedia, and so on. As an example, it looks as if the
Wikipedia article on the Assamese language in the Assamese language
(http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/অসমীয়া_ভাষা) is still quite incomplete.
Regards, Martin.
