Public Review Issue #123

Bengali Currency Numerator Values

The UTC has recently decided to encode a set of fraction characters specific to the Oriya script. See the listing for U+0B72..U+0B77 on the Pipeline page: http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html

Those characters are related also to the North Indic fraction characters approved somewhat earlier, which are currently under ballot. See the listing for U+A830..U+A837 on the Pipeline page.

It turns out that these fraction characters are also related to the so-called Bengali currency numerator characters, U+09F4..U+09F8, which have long been in the standard, dating all the way back to Unicode 1.0.

For the new sets of fraction characters, the UTC has approved fractional numeric values consistent with the usage of the characters to represent fractions: 1/16, 1/8, 3/16, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4. However, the current numeric values associated with the historically related Bengali characters are inconsistent with those numeric value assignments:

09F4;BENGALI CURRENCY NUMERATOR ONE;No;0;L;;;;1;N;;;;;
09F5;BENGALI CURRENCY NUMERATOR TWO;No;0;L;;;;2;N;;;;;
09F6;BENGALI CURRENCY NUMERATOR THREE;No;0;L;;;;3;N;;;;;
09F7;BENGALI CURRENCY NUMERATOR FOUR;No;0;L;;;;4;N;;;;;
09F8;BENGALI CURRENCY NUMERATOR ONE LESS THAN THE DENOMINATOR;No;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;

It has been proposed that these numeric values for Bengali be updated to fractional values consistent with the Oriya and North Indic fraction characters, as follows:

09F4 → 1/16 (i.e. 1 of 16)
09F5 → 1/8 (i.e. 2 of 16)
09F6 → 3/16 (i.e. 3 of 16)
09F7 → 1/4 (i.e. 4 of 16)
09F8 → 3/4 (i.e. 1 less than 4 of 4)

The UTC seeks feedback on the appropriateness of making this change in numeric value assignments. It would also be interested in any information about existing implementations that might be negatively impacted by such an update in numeric values for these five characters.

Bengali Currency Signs		Oriya Fraction Signs