Out of curiosity, before Unicode came along what was the state of the art for encoding/writing/displaying Bengali?
Sometimes I think issues with Unicode might be because it's trying to solve issues for languages that haven't yet arrived at a good solution for themselves yet.
Latin-using languages ended up going through a very long orthographic simplification and unification process after centuries of divergent orthographic development. These changes all occurred to simplify or improve some aspect of the language: improve readability, increase typesetting speed, reduce typesetting pieces. Early personal computers even did away with lowercase letters and some punctuation marks completely before they were grudgingly reintroduced.
I'm more familiar with Hangul (Korean), which has sometimes complex rules for composing syllables but has undergone fairly rapid orthographic changes once it was accepted into widespread and official use: dropping antiquated or dialectal letters, dropping antiquated tone markers, spelling revisions, etc. In addition, Chinese characters are now completely phased out in North Korea and are rapidly disappearing in the South.
It's my personal theory that the acceleration of this orthographic change has had to do with the increased need to mechanize (and later computerize) writing. Koreans independently came up with workable solutions to encode, write and display their system, sometimes by changing the system, sometimes by figuring out how to mechanically and then algorithmically encode the complex rules for their script. It appears that a happy medium has been found and Korean users happily pound away at keyboards for billions of keystrokes every year.
I'm digressing here, but pre-unicode, how had Bengali users solved the issue of mechanically and algorithmically encoding, inputting and displaying their own language? Is it just a case that the unicode team is ignorant of these solutions and hasn't transferred this hard-earned knowledge over?
I'm asking these questions out of ignorance of course, I don't know the story on either side.
On a second point, I'm deeply concerned about Unicode getting turned into a font-repository for slightly different (or even the same) character, that just happens to end up in another language. For example, Cherokee uses quite a few Latin letters (and numbers) (and quite a few original inventions). Is it really necessary to store all the Latin letters it uses again? Would a reader of Tsalagi really care too much if I used W or Ꮃ? When does a character go from being a letter to being a specific depiction of that letter?
Sometimes I think issues with Unicode might be because it's trying to solve issues for languages that haven't yet arrived at a good solution for themselves yet.
Latin-using languages ended up going through a very long orthographic simplification and unification process after centuries of divergent orthographic development. These changes all occurred to simplify or improve some aspect of the language: improve readability, increase typesetting speed, reduce typesetting pieces. Early personal computers even did away with lowercase letters and some punctuation marks completely before they were grudgingly reintroduced.
I'm more familiar with Hangul (Korean), which has sometimes complex rules for composing syllables but has undergone fairly rapid orthographic changes once it was accepted into widespread and official use: dropping antiquated or dialectal letters, dropping antiquated tone markers, spelling revisions, etc. In addition, Chinese characters are now completely phased out in North Korea and are rapidly disappearing in the South.
It's my personal theory that the acceleration of this orthographic change has had to do with the increased need to mechanize (and later computerize) writing. Koreans independently came up with workable solutions to encode, write and display their system, sometimes by changing the system, sometimes by figuring out how to mechanically and then algorithmically encode the complex rules for their script. It appears that a happy medium has been found and Korean users happily pound away at keyboards for billions of keystrokes every year.
I'm digressing here, but pre-unicode, how had Bengali users solved the issue of mechanically and algorithmically encoding, inputting and displaying their own language? Is it just a case that the unicode team is ignorant of these solutions and hasn't transferred this hard-earned knowledge over?
(note, I came across this page as I was writing this, how suitable was this solution? http://www.dsource.in/resource/devanagari-letterforms-histor...)
I'm asking these questions out of ignorance of course, I don't know the story on either side.
On a second point, I'm deeply concerned about Unicode getting turned into a font-repository for slightly different (or even the same) character, that just happens to end up in another language. For example, Cherokee uses quite a few Latin letters (and numbers) (and quite a few original inventions). Is it really necessary to store all the Latin letters it uses again? Would a reader of Tsalagi really care too much if I used W or Ꮃ? When does a character go from being a letter to being a specific depiction of that letter?