L2/18-181

[Doug Ewell via Unicode]

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18181-n4947-assamese.pdf

This is a fascinating proposal to disunify the Assamese script from
Bengali on the following bases:

1. The identity of Assamese as a script distinct from Bengali is in
jeopardy.

2. Collation is different between the Assamese and Bengali languages,
and code point order should reflect collation order.

3. Keyboard design is more difficult because consonants like ক্ষ
are encoded as conjunct forms instead of atomic characters.

4. The use of a single encoded script to write two languages forces
users to use language identifiers to identify the language.

5. Transliteration of Assamese into a different script is problematic
because letters have different phonological value in Assamese and
Bengali.

It will be interesting to see where this proposal goes. Given that all
or most of these issues can be claimed for English, French, German,
Spanish, and hundreds of other languages written in the Latin script, if
the Assamese proposal is approved we can expect similar disunification
of the Latin script into language-specific alphabets in the future.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org