Shikhar Sharma (left) at the discussion in Jorhat on Tuesday. Telegraph picture

Jorhat, June 28: The Asam Sahitya Sabha has resolved to send a proposal to the Unicode Forum in New York for renaming of the Unicode Bengali web page as Pub Naagari in a bid to encompass other languages such as Assamese and Manipuri which have the same script but were assumed to be following the Bengali script.

The decision was taken on the concluding day of the workshop-cum-discussion sessions today on preservation, growth and propagation of the Assamese language held at J.B. College here.

Secretary of the sabha Parmananda Rajbongshi said despite Assamese being a language that developed simultaneously or even before Bengali in the 5th century AD, the Assamese users had to use a web page developed for the Bengali language with an extension named Assamese specific with the two letters va and ra incorporated.

“We will approach the chief minister and if required, the Prime Minister, who represents Assam, to take this up with the right channels for a change of name,” he said.

The Manipuris, in a bid to do away with the similar script followed by the Bengalis and establish a separate identity, have already introduced the Metei script in the lower primary level in all the state schools.

The renaming proposal was put forward by Shikhar Sharma, who is developing Open Office, a software for Assamese computation under a project of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Pune.

Explaining the system, Sharma said computers mostly used the binary system where 1 and 0 combinations were used to denote symbols of all languages. All Bengali symbols had been thus incorporated by Bangladesh and neighbouring West Bengal about 10 to 12 years back but there were many differences, especially in the amalgam of consonants (juktakhyars) and other areas which varied and this was unacceptable for Assamese language users.

“We are working with a corpus of 15 lakh words to develop the Open Office software but without a uniform script grammar it is impossible to move forward,” he said.

“We urge the Asam Sahitya Sabha and other experts of the language to fast track the process to standardise a script grammar, especially in regard to juktakhyars and bisargas and resolve differences in spelling and pronunciation so that the software is acceptable to all,” he said.

Sharma said there was no need to bring in simplicity in the language in the mistaken belief that it would be more easy for computation. As a computer could be made to perform any complex task and all that the Asam Sahitya Sabha had to do with help of experts was to formulate a script rule, grammatical rule and inflectional rule, he said.

Regarding the Microsoft Assamese software, Sharma said the language had many mistakes and it was not viable for the software giant to invest millions of dollars to upgrade it, especially when there is no uniformity in the language.

He also predicted that it would take two to three years for the Unicode Forum to accept the change in name as there would be much debate and the proposal would have to be also put to Bangladesh and West Bengal, Assam and Manipur for acceptance. “We have to build a strong resource and background to put forward our arguments,” Sharma said.

He also appealed to the Assamese newspaper industry here not to use Ramdhenu or other software as these were not in Unicode and when downloaded into the Internet were only photocopies and if a Google search was made then nothing was found.

“The Assamese newspaper industry should come out from the image format to the HTML format so that the immense content in newspapers are made available for posterity. Otherwise this huge repository of knowledge and content in the Assamese language is getting lost,” he said.

The open office would have a spell-check, rules of grammar and other programmes and should be available in the market in another six months.