NOBO BANGLA - A HORRIBLE PROJECT

The news has not widely spread yet but there is venture to simplify the writing of Bangla language. Nobo Bangla is being promoted by systech Digital and I believe it is a brainchild of Mr. Shikder Monowar Murshed of linguistic department of the Dhaka University. In this effort they have decreased Bangla vowels & consonants to 39 only and completely eradicating the use of connected words. They claim that it can be easily applied in computer based applications and will be convenient for the users.

But from the look of it one thing I must say that "it sucks". It seems completely different than traditional Bengali scripts. The intention is good but the outcome just horrible. There have been much research to simplify Bangla language by managing the connected words better. But the outcome should not be accepted if it deviates significantly from the existing writing style of more than thousand years.

So I hope the Nobo Bangla people should try something else, keeping the original style and scripture. Being a language of 189 people and ranking 5th in the world, it should not be experimented with. When Bangladesh was under Pakistan rule, there was one such horrible plan by the government to use Arabic scripture to write Bangla.

For example the Ankur Bangla Project have been successful in implementing Bangla (Bengali) on GNU/Linux.