RE: L2/18-181

Everyone,

I was not serious about this proposal being "fascinating" or in any way
a model for what should happen with the Bengali script.

Please imagine a tongue-in-cheek expression as you re-read my post.
Maybe there is an emoji that depicts this. Maybe I've just been away
from the list too long and forgot that plain text often does not
communicate dry humor effectively.

James Kass wrote:

> We should strive to keep any criticism constructive rather than
> derisive.

Fair enough. My constructive suggestion would be to press vendors to
support Assamese language tools, so that spell-checking, sorting,
transcription, and other language-dependent operations will work
properly, whether or not that was the goal of the proposal. A language
with 15 million native speakers deserves no less.

Regarding keyboards, ক্ is a conjunct consisting of three code
points (U+0995, U+09CD, U+09B7) and fits comfortably on a single key
within a standard Windows layout. Indeed, the Assamese keyboards shipped
with Windows since at least 7 already have this key (E06, level 2).
Systems that limit a keystroke to one code point have problems that go
well beyond Assamese.

> If I'm not mistaken, the character naming for this script was
> inherited from the ISCII standard, so it was the Indian government's
> convention.

BIS made a mistake here in failing to distinguish languages, or
language-specific alphabets, from scripts, but it only cost them a
single attribute byte assignment in ISCII. Disunifying Assamese from
Bengali in Unicode would have a much greater impact.
 

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org