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> The Bengali fonts that you have installed happen to render it as a jophola It's not only the Bengali font - the text rendering framework of my operating sys

by sdg1 12y ago

> The Bengali fonts that you have installed happen to render it as a jophola It's not only the Bengali font - the text rendering framework of my operating system also needs to have a bunch of complex rules to figure out that a jophola needs to be rendered. It also needs to know that the visual ordering of i-kar is before the preceding consonant cluster (দ in আদিত্য). > the characters that are required to type a jophola have no semantic, phonetic, or orthographic connection to the jophola. Not so sure about that. The fact that it's called a "jo"-phola points to a relationship. The relationship may have become less apparent as the script has evolved (though there are words such as সহ্য which makes the relationship more visible), but the distinction is still not as pronounced as between "ta" and "khanda-ta". For the khanda-ta case, it was explicit from the the then-current editions of the dictionaries produced by the language bodies of both Bangladesh and West Bengal that the character had become distinct (স্বতন্ত্র বর্ণ was the phrase that was used). As far as I know, there hasn't been any such claim about jophola from the language bodies. Also, if you look at the collation in Bengali dictionaries, jo-phola is treated as (্+য) for collation.

chimeracoder 12y ago
Is Bengali your first language? While one can make the case that ত্য is simply "'to' - 'o' + 'ya' = 'to'"[0][1], it's rather confusing mental acrobatics, and it doesn't reflect either how the writing system is taught, or how native speakers use it and think of it on a day-to-day basis. If anything, your comment makes a stronger argument for consolidating ই and ি (they are literally the same letter and phoneme, but written differently in different contexts) than for combining the viram and য into the jophola. [0] To non-Bengali speakers reading this, yes, this is how that construction would work, and yes, I am aware that the arithmetic doesn't appear to add up (which I guess is part of the point). [1] Also, now that I think about it, the য is a consonant, not a vowel, so using it in place of a vowel is doubly awkward. This is particularly an issue in Bengali, where sounds that might be consonants in English (like "r" and "l") can be either consonants or vowels in Bengali, depending on the word.
- sdg1 12y ago
  > Is Bengali your first language? Yes. > [...] it's rather confusing mental acrobatics, and it doesn't reflect either how the writing system is taught, or how native speakers use it and think of it on a day-to-day basis. Mental acrobatics are part-and-parcel of the language, either in digital or non-digital form. If I were to spell out your name aloud, I would end with "ত-এ য-ফলা", which doesn't really say anything about how ত্য is pronounced. While writing on paper, we say "ক-এ ইকার", and then we reorder what we just said to write the ইকার in front of the ক. Even more complicated mental acrobatics - we say ক-এ ওকার, and then proceed to write half of the ওকার in front of the ক and then the other half, after the ক. We don't necessarily think about these when we carry out these acrobatics in our head, but they exist, and we have made the layer on top of the encoding system (rendering, and to some extent, input) deal with these acrobatics as well. My point in the original comment (and to some extent in the preceding one) was to emphasize that a lot of these issues are at the input method level - we should not have to think about encoding as long as it accurately and unambiguously represent whatever we want it to represent. Just out of curiosity - I would be interested to know more about your learning experience that you feel is not well aligned with the representation of jophola as it is currently.
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    > My point in the original comment (and to some extent in the preceding one) was to emphasize that a lot of these issues are at the input method level - we should not have to think about encoding as long as it accurately and unambiguously represent whatever we want it to represent. I might be sympathetic to this, except that keyboard layouts and input (esp. on mobile devices) is an even bigger mess and even more fragmented than character encoding. Furthermore, while keys are not a 1:1 mapping with Unicode codepoints, they are very strongly influenced by the defined codepoints. It'd be nice to separate those two components cleanly, but since language is defined by how it's used, this abstraction is always going to be very porous. > Just out of curiosity - I would be interested to know more about your learning experience that you feel is not well aligned with the representation of jophola as it is currently. I have literally never once heard the jophola referred to as a viram and a য, except in contexts such as this one. Especially since the jophola creates a vowel sound (instead of the consonant য), and especially since the jophola isn't even pronounced like "y". (I understand why the jophola is pronounced the way it does, but arguing on the basis of phonetic Sanskrit is a poor representation of Bengali today - by that point, we might as well be arguing that the thorn[0] is equivalent to "th" today, or that æ should be a separate letter and not a dipthong[1]) I'm not going to claim that it's completely without pre-digital precedent, but it certainly is not universal, and it's inconsistent in one of the above ways no matter how one slices it, especially when looking at some incredibly obscure and/or antiquated modifiers that are given their own characters, despite being undeniably joined of other characters that are already Unicode codepoints[2]. (Out of curiosity, where in Bengal are you from?) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29 [1] As it was in Old English. [2] Such as the ash (æ)!

by sdg1 12y ago

chimeracoder 12y ago

Is Bengali your first language? While one can make the case that ত্য is simply "'to' - 'o' + 'ya' = 'to'"[0][1], it's rather confusing mental acrobatics, and it doesn't reflect either how the writing system is taught, or how native speakers use it and think of it on a day-to-day basis. If anything, your comment makes a stronger argument for consolidating ই and ি (they are literally the same letter and phoneme, but written differently in different contexts) than for combining the viram and য into the jophola. [0] To non-Bengali speakers reading this, yes, this is how that construction would work, and yes, I am aware that the arithmetic doesn't appear to add up (which I guess is part of the point). [1] Also, now that I think about it, the য is a consonant, not a vowel, so using it in place of a vowel is doubly awkward. This is particularly an issue in Bengali, where sounds that might be consonants in English (like "r" and "l") can be either consonants or vowels in Bengali, depending on the word.

sdg1 12y ago
> Is Bengali your first language? Yes. > [...] it's rather confusing mental acrobatics, and it doesn't reflect either how the writing system is taught, or how native speakers use it and think of it on a day-to-day basis. Mental acrobatics are part-and-parcel of the language, either in digital or non-digital form. If I were to spell out your name aloud, I would end with "ত-এ য-ফলা", which doesn't really say anything about how ত্য is pronounced. While writing on paper, we say "ক-এ ইকার", and then we reorder what we just said to write the ইকার in front of the ক. Even more complicated mental acrobatics - we say ক-এ ওকার, and then proceed to write half of the ওকার in front of the ক and then the other half, after the ক. We don't necessarily think about these when we carry out these acrobatics in our head, but they exist, and we have made the layer on top of the encoding system (rendering, and to some extent, input) deal with these acrobatics as well. My point in the original comment (and to some extent in the preceding one) was to emphasize that a lot of these issues are at the input method level - we should not have to think about encoding as long as it accurately and unambiguously represent whatever we want it to represent. Just out of curiosity - I would be interested to know more about your learning experience that you feel is not well aligned with the representation of jophola as it is currently.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > My point in the original comment (and to some extent in the preceding one) was to emphasize that a lot of these issues are at the input method level - we should not have to think about encoding as long as it accurately and unambiguously represent whatever we want it to represent. I might be sympathetic to this, except that keyboard layouts and input (esp. on mobile devices) is an even bigger mess and even more fragmented than character encoding. Furthermore, while keys are not a 1:1 mapping with Unicode codepoints, they are very strongly influenced by the defined codepoints. It'd be nice to separate those two components cleanly, but since language is defined by how it's used, this abstraction is always going to be very porous. > Just out of curiosity - I would be interested to know more about your learning experience that you feel is not well aligned with the representation of jophola as it is currently. I have literally never once heard the jophola referred to as a viram and a য, except in contexts such as this one. Especially since the jophola creates a vowel sound (instead of the consonant য), and especially since the jophola isn't even pronounced like "y". (I understand why the jophola is pronounced the way it does, but arguing on the basis of phonetic Sanskrit is a poor representation of Bengali today - by that point, we might as well be arguing that the thorn[0] is equivalent to "th" today, or that æ should be a separate letter and not a dipthong[1]) I'm not going to claim that it's completely without pre-digital precedent, but it certainly is not universal, and it's inconsistent in one of the above ways no matter how one slices it, especially when looking at some incredibly obscure and/or antiquated modifiers that are given their own characters, despite being undeniably joined of other characters that are already Unicode codepoints[2]. (Out of curiosity, where in Bengal are you from?) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29 [1] As it was in Old English. [2] Such as the ash (æ)!