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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 i

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)!
  - plesner 12y ago
    Not necessarily disagreeing with your broader point but I just want to point out that the examples are only obscure and antiquared in English. æ is common in modern Danish and unambiguously a separate letter, as is þ in Icelandic.
    - 12y ago
derefr 12y ago
It seems to me that the high-level issue here is that Unicode is caught between people who want it to be a set of alphabets, and people who want it to be a set of graphemes. The former group would give each "semantic character" its own codepoint, even when that character is "mappable" to a character in another language that has the same "purpose" and is always represented with the same grapheme (see, for example, latin "a" vs. japanese full-width "a", or duplicate ideograph sets between the CJK languages.) In extremis, each language would be its own "namespace", and a codepoint would effectively be described canonically as a {language, offset} pair. The latter group, meanwhile, would just have Unicode as a bag of graphemes, consolidated so that there's only one "a" that all languages that want an "a" share, and where complex "characters" (ideographs, for example, but what we're talking about here is another) are composed as ligatures from atomic "radical" graphemes. I'm not sure that either group is right, but trying to do both at once, as Unicode is doing, is definitely wrong. Pick whichever, but you have to pick.
SiVal 12y ago
Is Bengali your first language? A better question is, Are there any native Bengali speakers creating character set standards in Bangladesh or India? If not, why not? If so, did they omit your character? I ask, because although you prefer to follow the orthodox pattern of blaming white racism for your grievance du jour, the policy of the Unicode Technical Committee for years has been to use the national standards created by the national standards bodies where these scripts are most used as their most important input. Twenty years ago, I spent a lot of time in these UTC meetings, and when the question arose as to whether to incorporate X-Script into the standard yet, the answer was never whether these cultural imperialists valued, say, Western science fiction fans over irrelevant foreigners, but it was always, "What is the status of X-Script standardization in X-land?" Someone would then report on it. If there was a solid, national standard in place, well-used by local native speakers in local IT applications, it would be fast-tracked into Unicode with little to no modification after verification with the national authorities that they weren't on the verge of changing it. If, however, there was no official, local standard, or several conflicting standards, or a local standard that local IT people had to patch and work around, or whatever, X-Script would be put on a back burner until the local experts figured out their own needs and committed to them. The complaint in this silly article about tiny Klingon being included before a complete Bengali is precisely because getting Bengali right was more complex and far more important. Apparently, the Bengali experts have not yet established a national standard that is clear, widely implemented, agreed upon by Bengali speakers and that includes the character the author wants in the form he/she wants it, for which he/she inevitably blames "mostly white men." (Edited to say "he/she", since I don't know which.)
- Manishearth 12y ago
  I mostly agree with your point, but note that the author is male (well, the name is a commonly male one). It's a bit telling that folks in the software industry[1] seem to assume that techies are male (a priori), but those who write articles of this kind are female. Not blaming you for it, but it's something you should try to be conscious about and fix. [1] I've been guilty of this myself, though usually in cases where I use terms like "guys" where I shouldn't be.
  - 12y ago

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)!
- plesner 12y ago
  Not necessarily disagreeing with your broader point but I just want to point out that the examples are only obscure and antiquared in English. æ is common in modern Danish and unambiguously a separate letter, as is þ in Icelandic.
  - 12y ago

derefr 12y ago

It seems to me that the high-level issue here is that Unicode is caught between people who want it to be a set of alphabets, and people who want it to be a set of graphemes. The former group would give each "semantic character" its own codepoint, even when that character is "mappable" to a character in another language that has the same "purpose" and is always represented with the same grapheme (see, for example, latin "a" vs. japanese full-width "a", or duplicate ideograph sets between the CJK languages.) In extremis, each language would be its own "namespace", and a codepoint would effectively be described canonically as a {language, offset} pair. The latter group, meanwhile, would just have Unicode as a bag of graphemes, consolidated so that there's only one "a" that all languages that want an "a" share, and where complex "characters" (ideographs, for example, but what we're talking about here is another) are composed as ligatures from atomic "radical" graphemes. I'm not sure that either group is right, but trying to do both at once, as Unicode is doing, is definitely wrong. Pick whichever, but you have to pick.

SiVal 12y ago

Is Bengali your first language? A better question is, Are there any native Bengali speakers creating character set standards in Bangladesh or India? If not, why not? If so, did they omit your character? I ask, because although you prefer to follow the orthodox pattern of blaming white racism for your grievance du jour, the policy of the Unicode Technical Committee for years has been to use the national standards created by the national standards bodies where these scripts are most used as their most important input. Twenty years ago, I spent a lot of time in these UTC meetings, and when the question arose as to whether to incorporate X-Script into the standard yet, the answer was never whether these cultural imperialists valued, say, Western science fiction fans over irrelevant foreigners, but it was always, "What is the status of X-Script standardization in X-land?" Someone would then report on it. If there was a solid, national standard in place, well-used by local native speakers in local IT applications, it would be fast-tracked into Unicode with little to no modification after verification with the national authorities that they weren't on the verge of changing it. If, however, there was no official, local standard, or several conflicting standards, or a local standard that local IT people had to patch and work around, or whatever, X-Script would be put on a back burner until the local experts figured out their own needs and committed to them. The complaint in this silly article about tiny Klingon being included before a complete Bengali is precisely because getting Bengali right was more complex and far more important. Apparently, the Bengali experts have not yet established a national standard that is clear, widely implemented, agreed upon by Bengali speakers and that includes the character the author wants in the form he/she wants it, for which he/she inevitably blames "mostly white men." (Edited to say "he/she", since I don't know which.)

Manishearth 12y ago
I mostly agree with your point, but note that the author is male (well, the name is a commonly male one). It's a bit telling that folks in the software industry[1] seem to assume that techies are male (a priori), but those who write articles of this kind are female. Not blaming you for it, but it's something you should try to be conscious about and fix. [1] I've been guilty of this myself, though usually in cases where I use terms like "guys" where I shouldn't be.
- 12y ago