The Unicode Consortium Discussion Forum

Coming straight to the point, Unicode needs to understand the linguistic rivalry between the two sovereign languages, Assamese and Bengali, and stop taking a judgemental role in this regard. A rivalry, started by the British imperialistic forces and subjects in the Bengal region but finished by the Assamese linguistic, literary and academic intellectual giants with their brilliant efforts way back in 1873, is well recorded in the history. The thick line of separation has since been drawn with both sides acknowledging the mutual exclusiveness of all the necessary properties of their individual languages, scriptual, phonetical, grammatical and orthographic to name a few besides thousands of words and idioms that make them mutually unintelligible.
09F0 and 09F1 are the signature letters of Assamese script. So why Unicode has pulled the trigger to disturb a bilateral cease-fire that is in place since 1873?
It has come to the notice through a published report http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120224/j ... 173871.jsp that Unicode has written to the Indian Government informing the on-going controversy and I believe that Unicode must not deny discussion and rectification of the controversial issues in the pretext that they are political in nature rather than technical. Things are not as simple as they appear to be for any onlooker.

09F0 and 09F1 are like Jerusalem where two parties are involved. Except here on the letters concerned, Assamese script has unilateral claim without any counter-claim from the other party and Unicode should not act in a way that lead to formation of Israel leaving behind the Palestinians in the lurch fighting for their own piece of land. I think our battle was brought to a conclusion almost one and a half century ago and Unicode should not become instrumental to re-instigate it. Unicode must acknowledge and respect the line of separation that is in place since 118 years before its own birth and stop trying to wipe out a sovereign Assamese language script that is in use by us and our predecessors, preserving as far possible, all its uniqueness since long before America was born on the face of the earth.

Have you looked at the latest code chart? It records U+09F0 and U+09F1 under the heading 'Additions for Assamese'. Given that they need to be in the same script as the vowel marks used for Assamese to be sure that they can be used with them by typical modern rendering systems, you can't get much better in the way of 'restoration'.

Yeah Richard, but why would you be content with the fact that you can fully write your language in all its nuance and beauty? The name is wrong! There are only a few hundred million people still waiting for Unicode to develop support for their native scripts. Obviously, correcting the injustice of wrong names (and "Bengali" to boot!) for the perfect and unsullied Assamese language is so much more important than enabling all of humanity to join the digital age.

It has been seen in the latest version 6.1 , regarding 09F0 and 09F1 , a mention of the word " Assamese " is made. ( I don't know whether " Assamese" here signify the "Assamese Language " or the " Assamese Script". ) In my view, the whole script, right from 0980 to 09FB, that includes 09F0 and 09F1 , is the "Assamese script". The concerned pdf file U0980 needs a new header ( Call it "Assamese/Bengali" or simply "Assamese") with consequent and subsequent changes in the letter's descriptions.( Calling them " Assamese/Bengali or simply "Assamese" ).

And since apparently it is not possible, as many of you have observed , Assamese and Bengali scripts need separation in the digital world like they are in the actual world.

DelexR