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Panel to examine traits of Assamese script

By STAFF REPORTER

GUWAHATI, March 18 � The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has constituted a panel to examine the issue of independent characteristics of the Assamese script. The panel is to examine the issues related to the Assamese language as it relates to various ISO standards.

According to the minutes of the fifth meeting of the Indian Language Technologies and Products Sectional Committee, LITD 20 of the BIS, which was held on February 5 last at New Delhi, Guwahati-based surgeon Dr Satyakam Phukan made a presentation on his proposal for a separate Unicode for the Assamese language in ISO 10646-1 �Information technology�Universal Coded Character Set (UCS).�

Dr Phukan claimed that Assamese is a separate script and not a subscript of the Bengali script.

But the Indian Language Technologies and Products Sectional Committee, LITD 20 �thinks that this issue needs to be discussed separately in detail. The committee decided to form a panel regarding the issues raised by Dr Phukan. The work of the panel is to examine the issues related to the Assamese language as it relates to various ISO standards.

It needs mention here that the issue of recognizing the Assamese script as a script independent of the Bengali script has been raised by the elite section of the State for quite a long time, but to no avail.

The issue became an emotional one for the people of the State as the Assamese script, despite its distinguished characteristics, has been treated as a subscript of the Bengali script while determining its Universal Coded Character for using it in Information Technology (IT).

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