[Oriya-group] My Point of View on Font issue

[Manik]

Dear friends,

 

I saw some discussion on the font issue lately and thought I should have
commented earlier on what I think about the matter.

>---------- Hariram Pansari wrote:

>No any international linguist had avoided this fact. 

>With a general commonsence everyone realise that :

> 

>swa = 0B38+0B4D+0B71, it never should be 0B38+0B4D+0B2C,i.e.=sba.

>as in swaadhin, pakwa, svatva - should never be sbaadhin, pakba, sbatba.

> 

>mba = 0B2E+0B4D+0B2C, it never should be 0B2E+0B4D+0B71,i.e.=mwa.

>as in Aamba, lambaa, - should never be Aamwa, lamwaa. 

 

My Point-of-view -

 

As per Oriya Grammar, there is nothing like a 'wa phala' as there is also no
jya phala. (It is no way linked with 0B1C) The jya phala issue is quite old.
Much older grammar focuses on jya phala whereas ya phala has replaced jya
phala virtually in every BarnaBodh and grammar book taught to children in
schools. Talking about wa it is a letter even it was not there when we
studied our first BarnaBodh. In recent times it is being used with a new
composite glyph 0B13&vophala for maintaining unison with Hindi and other
indic scripts.

 

For core usability issue - 

1.	If somebody not acquainted with oriya wants to read the text he will
face pronunciation problems.
2.	If tomorrow a software app tries to translate oriya text to hindi or
other indic scripts then it will face problems which will need hard-coding
algorithms to differentiate ba phala and wa phala as well as za phala and ya
phala. Though there would be no issues for translating to Oriya.
3.	If people have used the wa phala and composed text so compatibility
maintenance may be necessary; however it is a non issue as Unicode adoption
is in its nascent stages.

Expected troubles -

1.	By inducing jya and wa phala we would have to re-write Oriya grammar
which would not be appreciated by many. Are we here to correct Oriya which
is written and spoken by millions for the sake of ease of computerization?
Was it not the issue like writing kampa (shiver - En_GB) as kongpa (ka
anuswar pa) during early computerization and people tried to justify the
phonetic anomalies for the sake of computerization?
2.	Most Oriya people will need to be educated about an esoteric 'wa
phala' or 'jya phala' which have never been there in any dictionary or
"BarnaBodh".
3.	We should always keep in mind that there is no proper Oriya language
implementation floating around to base our efforts on. Don't bend too much
on Unicode as Unicode is incomplete, at many places illogical and
outrageously incorrect. It is not the final word on Oriya glyphs and is
subject to heavy changes as and when efforts from governmental agencies like
CDAC pour in.
4.	For example 'ka halant ba' what will it yield? 'kwa'. It will never
yield 'kba' and so these two hypothetical conjuncts are pure mutually
exclusive.
5.	So if 'kba' is somewhere needed it should be written as 'ka
halant|nonjoiner|ba' which is analogous to what we currently have in common
practice. So here you see a practical need for the joiner as the issue
raised by Mr. Pansari.

 

>---------- Hariram Pansari wrote:

>But Unicode OT has vast scope... other OR-OT drafts appears to include...

>If we wait for their release, we have to follow them. If we have to include
it, then the entire DATA has to be re->edited with extra manpower usage.

 

6.	It does not happen like that. Incompleteness of standards will keep
them from mass adoption for some time from now. If the system that we use
remains valid (it will of course!) despite of the changes any extra trivial
substitution issues can be left to script based substitutions. I still get
quirks with ko with ssho giving rise to xa but however things like these
should be better digested earlier.

 

Sorry for commenting late but I feel that if issues arise let Oriya Grammar
books speak. However as Mr. Pansari commented:

>With a general commonsence everyone realise that :

Commonsense should be applied but it is difficult that everyone realizes a
single point. 

Font issues are important but many turnarounds are there as we can pretty
well write 0B13&vophala for wa and it will show up properly even after any
amount of re-thinking on U0B71 which I don't think may happen anyway.

 

As for the translation work, it is not getting anywhere. We should try
something innovative fast! How about some automated tool Gorababu? (Like in
Kbabel). In that way absurdities will certainly creep in but it will get us
somewhere soon.

 

With best wishes,

Manik Chand Patnaik.

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