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Nepalese Script in Unicode, 1: JTC1/WG2 N4184 Open Thread

Your comments are invited on a proposal to encode the script ‘prevalent’/’in vogue’ (pracalita) in Nepal since the late fourteenth century, and which since the Shah period has continued in use in the scribal and print culture of the Newars. The proposal under discussion was submitted a month ago by Anshuman Pandey to the international standards body for character sets, WG2 under JTC1 of the ISO. Download it here:

Anshuman Pandey. ‘Proposal to Encode the Newar Script in ISO/IEC 10646’. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 proposal N4184 [PDF]. January 5, 2012. [Supersedes N4038, ‘Preliminary Proposal to Encode the Prachalit Nepal Script’]

Anyone can submit a proposal for consideration by WG2. However, this is not a trivial process; documents need to comply with the group’s requirements, and if I observe correctly, there are very few competing complete proposals for historic scripts. No proposal has come from the Nepalese government, Newar culture having little, if any, official status in the Shah and post-Shah nation-state. The proposal under discussion (hereafter “N4184”) is that of a private individual, in collaboration with the Script Encoding Initiative at Berkeley. Mr. Pandey has graciously agreed to consider informed feedback on his proposal, which I hope will be incorporated into future documents submitted to WG2. It is in this constructive spirit that your feedback is requested; anyone may add comments via the form the end of this post.

1. Intended scope of these comments: focus on repertoire

The present discussion should focus on the completeness and accuracy of the glyph repertoire represented in the present proposal. Matters such as the proposed name and classification of the script, the description of interaction between glyphs (e.g. conjunct formation, §4.8.1), issues related to other Nepalese or Indic scripts (except where strictly relevant) and so on should notbe discussed here. If there is sufficient interest, these matters can be addressed in separate posting(s). Here I will offer some of my own preliminary, informal feedback on the proposal, on which comments are also welcome.

N4184 aims to “encode a core set of Newar characters” (p.17). This invites the question of how “core” should be defined. I will not discuss this in depth, other to say that the standard should include those characters which are most common and most useful in this form of writing. Specifically, I propose that the characters depicted in Figs.6 and 7 below should be part of the standard. This is the repertoire proposed in N4184:

Pandey 2012:24, Fig.1

Continue reading “Nepalese Script in Unicode, 1: JTC1/WG2 N4184 Open Thread”

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Luo Hong, Kālidāsa’s Ṛtusaṃhāra (2010) & Meghadūta (2011)

迦梨陀娑 (著), 罗鸿 (汉文译著), 拉先加 (藏文译注) 〈迦梨陀娑《时令之环》汉藏译注与研究〉 中国藏学出版社 39元

Kālidāsa; Hong Luo (Ch. tr); Lha Byams rgyal (Tib. ed. & tr.). Jiālítuósuō “Shí​lìng zhī huán” Hàn-Zàng yìzhù​ yǔ​ yán​jiū [Kālidāsa’s Ṛtusaṃhāram: Annotated translation and study in Chinese & Tibetan]. Beijing: China Tibetology Publishing House, December 2010. ISBN 978-7-80253-294-6. [official site]

《时令之环》

迦梨陀娑(著), 罗鸿 (译者)〈云使〉北京大学出版社 29元

Kālidāsa; Hong Luo (Ch. tr). Yún​shǐ [Meghadūtam]. Beijing: Peking University Press, June 2011. ISBN 978-7-301-18795-1. [official site]

《云使》
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Administrivia: Brief end-of-year report

  • Traffic is up about 375% over last year, according to one metric. Many of the new visitors are sentient beings.
  • The top three countries from which readers visit Jinajik are the USA, Japan and Germany (not necessarily in that order). Great nations like the great yāna, it seems.
  • There may be no such thing as a free bhojana, but the lure of it is precisely what brings many of you here. The most clicked-on tag in 2011 is Sanskrit text, closely followed by PDF.
  • The most read article this year, by far, was last year’s announcement of Michael Allen’s The Daśakarma Vidhi. (For those who might want more, I have a short review forthcoming in the Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia.)
  • Complaints received in 2011: 0. Compliments received: 1. (A ratio that would please Mr. Micawber.)
New year fireworks, Melbourne, 2012.
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Shrestha, ‘Street transformation in Kathmandu’ (2011)

Dr. Shrestha reports on a happy new role for Newar Buddhist monasteries, one that the advocates of ‘Rebuilding Buddhism’ would surely welcome: the parking lot.

Bijaya K. Shrestha. ‘Street typology in Kathmandu and street transformation’.
Urbani izziv 22 no. 2, 2011, pp.107–121. DOI:10.5379/urbani-izziv-en-2010-21-02-002 [PDF]

There is much useful information here (like the data showing the Kathmandu Valley’s population amost tripling in three decades; p.115, fig.7), in addition to Shrestha’s lucid account of how the Newars’ great cities have been mismanaged.

Te Bāhā, Kathmandu, as car park.
Te Bāhā, Kathmandu, as car park. Bijaya Shrestha (2011:118).

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Wakahara, ‘Buddhist Sanskrit MSS in Bangladesh’ (2011)

若原雄昭 「バングラデシュ国内に保存されるサンスクリット仏教写本 , 他」 龍谷大学アジア仏教文化研究センター

Wakahara, Yusho. ‘Sanskrit Buddhist Manuscripts Preserved in Bangla Desh’. Ryukoku University Research Center for Buddhist Cultures in Asia, Working Paper 1, 2011. [PDF]

Kudos to Prof. Wakahara for getting some good photographs of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts out of Bangladesh. So in future reports on these manuscripts there should be no problem with providing full transcriptions of the colophons, including all the information about their Nepalese (and Tibetan, in one case) transmitters and users.

Karunapundarika and Karandavyuha
Karuṇāpuṇḍarīka and Kāraṇḍavyūha.
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Ramachandran, Lumbini ‘courts controversy’ (2011/11/17)

An article published in the Asia Times this month* reminds us what an awful mess Lumbini is:

Mired in corruption, it evokes despair rather than spiritual upliftment.

[…]

“The monastic zone is dominated by Japanese Mahayana sects. Vajrayana, the Himalaya’s own distinctive contribution to Buddhism, is the most neglected,” Pathak pointed out.

[…]

This has “sparked competition among sects” and encouraged “factionalism – that, too, based on nationality”, Rachana Pathak wrote in Himal magazine.

[…]

But crass commercialization and ostentation evident in new buildings prompted a Western scholar of Himalayan Buddhism to lament that Lumbini was on its way to becoming a “religious Disneyland”.

It’s a little late to complain about that. When you hitch your wagon to globalized culture, which the McBuddhism at Lumbini epitomizes so well, false taste and colonial structure is what you inevitably get. It’s a small world, after all:

Lumbini's Theravadin monastery (this image may be factually inaccurate).

* Sudha Ramachandran. ‘Buddha’s birthplace courts controversy’. Asia Times, November 17, 2011. [link]

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Raguram et al, Reconstruction of Reflected Input (2011)

Extreme philology: typed text can be recovered from a reflected image of the writer’s hand motions, even when the writing device itself is in motion and the writing itself is invisible. For example, if you sit at the front of a vehicle and type on a mobile phone, someone at the back of the vehicle can record the reflection in glasses or a window and extract the typed text from the recording. The process is innovative, but its constituent elements are not; it chains digital magnification, image stabilization, difference matting and optical character recognition into a single hair-raising violation of privacy:

Rahul Raguram, Andrew White, Dibyendusekhar Goswami, Fabian Monrose and Jan-Michael Frahm. ‘iSpy: Automatic Reconstruction of Typed Input from Compromising Reflections’. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2011. [author’s site / PDF]

From the Abstract

Using footage captured in realistic environments (e.g., on a bus), we show that we are able to reconstruct fluent translations of recorded data in almost all of the test cases, correcting users’ typing mistakes at the same time. We believe these results highlight the importance of adjusting privacy expectations in response to emerging technologies.

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Query: Deposit libraries for Buddhist studies

Which public libraries accept donations of scholarly books on Buddhism? I hope to facilitate the building of collections in institutions that are open to the public and support Buddhist studies. I am looking specifically for information on collections in Asia: India, peninsular Southeast Asia, China and Korea.

Please send me your recommendations, together with contact details (if you have any). This information may be compiled, entirely at my discretion, into an open list of Buddhist studies deposit libraries, unless you ask for it to be kept private. Feel free to reply either by email or in the comments.

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EB Garamond: A better class of open-source font

Georg Duffner’s EB Garamond, according to its official website, “is an open source project to create a revival of Claude Garamont’s famous humanist typeface from the mid-16th century.”

It has true italics, true bold (more like semi-bold), true subscripts and superscripts, true swash caps and true small caps (including true capital ß – see Ralf Herrmann’s crystal-clear presentation on this). There are old style figures, discretionary ligatures, and work-in-progress initials. And in particular, there is coverage of the Unicode Latin Extended Additional codeblock.

This is not only actually all in a free font, but in one that looks pretty good, as the specimen [PDF] shows:

EB Garamond specimen, p.9
EB Garamond specimen: just... wow.

Although I haven’t given EB Garamond a full tryout yet, I can confirm that it works out of the box in XeTeX, which is probably the tool that can exploit its advantages to the fullest.

A caveat: EB Garamond is work in progress; Cyrillic italics, for example, are clearly provisional at the time of writing, and some outlines were updated as recently as a couple of weeks ago on github. Nonetheless, it will be good enough to set camera-ready copy for many projects as it stands; it is certainly miles ahead of the unspeakable G****** U****** and its ilk. Thankyou, Mr. Duffner.

Files

https://github.com/georgd/EB-Garamond/blob/master/otf/EBGaramond.otf?raw=true
https://github.com/georgd/EB-Granjon/raw/master/OTF/EBGaramondItalic.otf
https://github.com/georgd/EB-Granjon/blob/master/OTF/EBGaramondBold.otf

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‘Cambridge to study ancient Sanskrit texts’ (2011/11/08)

Someone in England is studying the sources of the South Asian Buddhist mainstream?

“The project, which is led by Sanskrit-specialists Dr Vincenzo Vergiani and Dr Eivind Kahrs, will study and catalogue each of the manuscripts, placing them in their broader historical context, a university release said.

So far, so good.

“In the 1870s, Dr Daniel Wright, surgeon of the British Residency in Kathmandu, rescued the now-priceless cultural and historical artefacts from a disused temple, where they had survived largely by chance.”

Oh dear. Still, this sounds better:

“Most of the holdings will also be digitised by the library and made available through the library’s new online digital library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/).”

Let’s hope the cameras get to those masterpieces of Nepal and the Pāla Dynasty before the local twits [see final sentence], eh?

(‘Cambridge to study ancient Sanskrit texts.’ Deccan Herald, Nov 8, 2011.)