Talk:Pracalit script

Background info

This is the Newar language which has a rich written tradition extending back at least a thousand years. Over the years the community has developed a number of distinct scripts or writing styles, reserving particular styles for particular purposes - Ranjana writing for religious purposes, Prachalit for everyday writing, Bhujimmola for administrative purposes, and so on. Similar practices of reserving particular styles of writing for particular purposes has also occurred in European writing using the Roman system. But whatever style they are writing in, the Newars are still writing in their own Newar language (which they call Nepal Bhasha). In 2010 Michael Everson set out to encode Ranjana, with visual similarities persuading him that this as a writing system used in many parts of the Himalayas for writing Buddhist texts, though he focused on Nepal and the Newars, who in turn petitioned him to consider Prachalit as being much more useful. In the end Everson concluded that Ranjana and Prachalit and the many other styles should be unified. And so they should be, for they are used to write the same language. But there are some inconsistencies between the different scripts, and one account by Rabison Shakya seems to give Prachalit several more basic characters than Ranjana and Bhujimmola; how do we resolve this? Of course, we must refer to the language, and in this case the phonetic inventory, which shows that Shakya's account of Prachalit is correct, there are aspirated nasals not identified in his tables for Ranjana and Bhujimmola. A question not asked by Everson was whether the Newar writing should be unified in Unicode with Devanagari, just as the writing of Sindhi has been, but that would be politically unacceptable. Bizarrely a proposal to encode Prachalit has recently been posted by Anshuman Pandey (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N4038) who seems to be following the same confusion as Everson, focussing on visual similarities rather linguistic use.

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Rich Farmbrough, 22:02, 12 January 2013 (UTC).