The Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology Ministry Mustafa Jabbar said, ‘Bangladesh is the capital of Bengali language for 35 crore Bengali speakers in the world. Bangladesh has standardized the quality of Bengali encoding and keyboard in digital technology. Sheikh Hasina has undertaken a project worth Tk 159 crore for the development of 16 tools in Bengal, the work of which is in progress. On the other hand, the Unicode Consortium has made the complexity of Bengali language terrible. We are unfortunate that we were not a member of Unicode when encoding Bangla. At that time Indian Bengali speakers completely denied the uniqueness of our language by encoding Bengali as Devanagari. We can't solve it even after fighting for a long time. But we are conquering the world with Bengali language.’
He said that the same keyboard and software are used for publishing in Bangladesh. Here, the wall between ASCII and Uncode has been demolished and broken. Even then, the complexity of Unicode conversion is not the fault of Bengali speakers; This main fault is using Unicode. So we are still at war with Unicode. Only the youth of Bangladesh will win this war with their intellect.
The minister was speaking as the chief guest at a webinar on the crisis and solutions to the use of Bangla script in the digital world, organized by Computer Jagat, a monthly technology magazine in Dhaka on Wednesday night.
Mentioning that the Unicode Consortium is responsible for the technical problems of Bengali language and literature, the Minister said that by not considering Bangla language as a unique language, we have been severely harmed by following 'Devanagari'. That's why we still have to fight with ‘Nokta’, a set of specific letter that are used in Bengali language. But there is no dot in Bengali letter. If Unicode had solved these problems by looking at Bengali as Bengali, then the problem would not arise. Mentioning that Bangladesh joined the Unicode Consortium late in 2010, minister Mustafa Jabbar, the inventor of Bangla language in computer, said that the crisis could have been overcome if Bengali speakers could have played a role in the encodings of Indian language family in Unicode Consortium. The Minister pointed out that we are suffering from these problems today as a result of defining it as a dialect of Devanagari following the way it is coded following Devanagari. He said the use of Bangla NLP including spell checker, dictionary, OCR etc are being hampered due to non-application of ASCII, Unicode and standard standards in the use of Bangla language in technology. Therefore, he urged the concerned people to be more vocal about its implementation.
Minister Mustafa Jabbar, a pioneer in the development of digital technology, said that there are problems in Unicode with Bangla script, saying that there is a big crisis in big data analysis, search engine, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things. There are differences in the size of Bangla script. The use of different Bengali software can be noticed in the case of ‘Chandrabindu’ in Bangla script. The problem is obvious in the case of consonants. Bangla data mining has not yet become the equivalent of industry. There seems to be a lot of problem in Bengali corpus to model language.
The keynote address was delivered by Mohammad Mamun Aur Rashid, Language Technology Specialist, Bangladesh Computer Council.
Professor Uday Narayan Singh, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Chair of Linguistics from MIT University participated in the discussion from India. He said, ‘There is a strange spiritual connection with Bangla script. There are so many types it's hard to say. With this we are five feet ahead and four feet back. That is why Bangladesh has to take the lead to take this language forward. '
Data Science Writer Rakibul Hasan, Chief Executive Officer of Bangladesh NGO Network for Radio and Communication AHM Bazlur Rahman and Nipa Jahan, Assistant Professor, Department of Bangla, National University also spoke on the webinar.
It is to be mentioned that Unicode was started in 1987 by Apple Computer. Later, major IT companies, including Microsoft, joined the initiative and formed the Unicode Consortium. Mustafa Jabbar, chief executive of Anondo Computers and now Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, attended an Apple conference in Thailand in 1988. Unicode Bengali did not have these four letters R, D, Y and T at that time. Mustafa Jabbar raised questions about the subject and these are added back then.
Mustafa Jabbar, chairman of the country's first online Bangla news agency Abas, said Bangla publishing was once based in Kolkata. There was no type foundry here. Kolkata was the center of typesetters and other technologies. Bangabandhu first introduced the Optima Munir typewriter in 1972 following the keyboard invented by Shaheed Munir Chowdhury. Then Bengali came in publishing and revolution came in publishing in Bangladesh. He said Bangladesh has retained that leadership and will continue to do so in the future.
