Continue: Glaring mistake in nomenclature , should it have been " Assamese" ?

Shriramana Sharma wrote :
>Look -- Unicode is an international standard. English is the
>international language of science and technology, whether you like it or
>not. And as Michael Everson as pointed out, the script is more commonly
>known in the English language as the Bengali script
……………..
>And the reasons for the script to be better known as the Bengali script
>rather than Assamese are obvious. As per records Bengali
>is the *fifth* most widely spoken language in the world with a speaker
>population of 181 million (closely following Hindi with 182). Assamese
>is at place *fifty-four* with speaker population of 16.8 million, less
>than *one-tenth* of that of Bengali. It is even behind Chattisgarhi
>language with 17.5 million speakers, and the separate state of
>Chattisgarh was only even formed recently. Given this, you should not
>expect special treatment for the name "Assamese".
## Well I was definitely expecting such an argument and that came from a compatriot and before anyone or at least I could say anything and put him/her in checkmate, he/she him/herself wrote:
>It is but natural that in the absence of a pre-agreed name for a script for other
>reasons (such as the Latin script), a script is better internationally
>recognized by the language that it is more (in terms of sheer volume)
>used for.
## I think s/he has given and finished her/his his point about why the name of the script is chosen as “Bengali” ….. The English knew “Calcutta” as such,,,, why have you changed it to “Kolkata” ? Well irrelevant from the point of view of encoding characters but my compatriot should understand that “Standardization” is not something about what the English thinks or says . So far as science and technology is concerned the English (British) standards are already obsolete.
Philippe Verdy wrote:
>But Mr Delex must understand that the UCS (by Unicode or ISO/IEC
>10646) does NOT encode language-specific alphabets, but "unified"
>scripts that share a lot of common letters and a common structure is
>such a way that those languages can be freeely mixed and interchanged
>without duplicating the letters.
## Was it really necessary for Unicode to give so many Hexcodes to “Zero” which looks same and in fact same in almost all the South-East Asian scripts (also in Latin , I guess ) ? Is it such that unicode is planning “Devanagari three – Devanagari three = Devanagari Zero” or “Bengali three – Bengali three = Bengali zero” ??
>But what he really wants is to avoid being exposed to these "Bengali" names. This is not a matter
>of tehcnical encoding, but more a question of localisation (for
>example when using a character picker application, or when searching
>character collections by names).
## Definitely!! How can a native Assamese/software developer tolerate when he is being taught by Unicode through its well researched descriptions about the characters 09F0 and 09F1 as Bengali letter this and this ?
> I may give some excuses to him, if he is not aware of the technical
> justification of why names are immutables ….
## “Immutables” …. “Can’t be changed any way” …….. “ .. UCS cannot, and will not ever, be changed” …. When something done can’t be undone we should think 100 times before doing that and even then should keep a way for undoing. If 09F0 and 09F1 is done to be described as Bengali letters , I will say hundred, thousand well every time that Unicode is wrong , both in its effort and essence of what has come out of it. If there is no Ctrl+Alt+Del , such standards, applications or whatever should outright be rejected ,blocked and quarantined.
Received on Wed Sep 14 2011 - 13:00:45 CDT