[Oriya-group] Please read

[Rajat Kumar Mohanty]

There is a typo in my previous mail. Please correct "phychological" and
"phychlogy" as "psychological" and "psychology". Sorry for the
inconvenience.
--Rajat


> Dear ListMembers,
>
> Here is a few lines pertaining to ja-phala as mentioned in Dr. Nikhil's
> mail and .pdf file
> -----------------
> The point is whether we will design our software (1) keeping the current
> practice of the mass in mind or (2)just because it is already approved by
> some Govt. agencies/ISCII-1991 standard. First of all no native language
> software should be designed considering the borrowed words seriously (I
> don't know how many of you do agree with me).
>
> (From the attached .pdf file in Dr. Nikhil's mail..."The current text
> books, developed very professionally by competent people and supported
> well by current grammatical practices, state the following:
> A. Antastha ja (ya) and yya are two forms of the same letter. In earlier
> times yya was not used at the beginning of a word, but is used now with
> adapted words like Yunani and Europe.
> In combination with other conjuncts it is treated as 'ja' phala.")
>
> From the above para, I wish to comment on the phrase "current grammatical
> practices".
>
> If the quoted lines are true among the Odia mass, what is the expected
> situation if a software is given to a common man and he is asked to write
> the Odia word 'kabya' (epic) for the first time. Without any special
> instruction, he will definitely use y(0B2F)key, not yya(0B5F). Because at
> the phychological level he reads it as ja-phala. That is the whole point.
> Here comes a conceptual question: Do the software developers need to
> consider the phychlogy of the human beings when they are developing a
> machine for the human beings?
>
> Now if we decide that " 'ja' phala to be formed with 'yya' (0B5F)", we are
> definitely doing it only to maintain the ISCII-1991 standard. It is a fact
> that ISCII-1991 is no longer in use now and is going to dead soon. It is
> obvious that nobody will use ISCII-1991 once the Unicode based systems are
> available for mass use. Then the question is whether the current
> Unicode-based systems have the compatibility with the obsolete ISCII-1991
> based systems or contents. Is there a grand necessity for that? If yes,
> with a small engineering, that can be handled. The ISCII based contents
> can be converted to the Unicode standard. And that will be done once by
> experts. For example, the CILL corpus which is in ISCII will be converted
> to Unicode only once. By just some replacement techniques, we can correct
> the ISCII text and convert it to Unicode standard for the advanced NLP.
> There after no body even look at the ISCII one.
>
> Finally, I want to say that the mass may not get the opportunity to raise
> the loud voice against 'ja' phala to be formed with 'yya' (0B5F) or some
> other similar problem), because only a very small fraction of Oriya people
> have access to the cutting edge technology. On the other side, only a
> handful of people like us are playing with ICT and the future of this
> language is solely dependent on this small community. But by doing this in
> the name of maintaining the ISCII (once accepted inappropriate standard,
> when there was no active Orissa-it or oriya-group yahoo groups or so), we
> are forcing the mass to switch over to the IT practice from their usual
> non-IT practice (i.e., from ja-phala to yya phala), isn't it?
>
> Thanks for your patience for reading this boring topic.
>
> Regards,
> Rajat
>
>
>
>
>> Hello!
>> With reference to the current discussion on the Oriya conjucts with 'ya'
>> and 'ba' and 'wa', I would like to suggest that the Indian Standards
>> based
>> on ISCII-1991 (and followed essentially by the Unicode org for modern,
>> non-vedic text) should be adhered to.
>>
>> This would imply the following:
>> 'ja' phala to be formed with 'yya' (0B5F),
>> 'ba' phala to be formed with 'ba' (0B2C) and
>> 0B71 to be taken as the glyph for letter 'wa'.
>>
>> I am attaching a detailed note (a bit long for the post) giving the
>> background and rationale for my suggestion and some other supplementary
>> material. Hope that this will be uploaded to the files section.
>>
>> Using non-standard rules will create more problems when other developers
>> come up with their products. It is particularly important that big
>> players
>> like Microsoft (I do not know what role has OCAC played in the
>> development
>> of Kalinga font) and RedHat should stick to the standards.
>>
>> The Oriya rendering in Windows Vista with their Kalinga font has
>> problems
>> with 'ya/yya' and 'ba' letters and phalas as well as the letter 'wa'.
>> Although the glyphs show up correctly in the charmap they do not appear
>> so
>> in Wordpad.
>>
>> The Utkal font (the most recent version bundled with Suse 10.1) works
>> fine
>> on Windows Vista, but the yya phala there forms with ja (ya). I have
>> requested help for correcting this from several people and hope that it
>> will be done soon.
>>
>> Nikhil
>>
>>
>
>