Subject: [Ltru] Punjabi

From: "Abbas Malik" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 02:00:51 +0100

Dear All,

I personally support Mr. Sukhjinder Sidhu’s suggestion that we should take
PA-IN (Gurmukhi) and PA-PK (Shahmukhi). These code names are being developed
for Unicode and according to my best knowledge Unicode is a writing standard
for world’s languages. As far as Punjabi is concerned, it is two main
writing systems one is Gurmukhi (0A00 – 0A7F) and Shahmukhi (represented in
Arabic code page).

Mr. John Cowan talked about “Eastern Panjabi”, “Western Panjabi”, “Mirpu
Panjabi”, “Hindko”, “Seraiki”, “Pahari - Potwari”. I have been working on
the European Union funded project named PLATT (Punjabi Language and
Transliteration Tool) to build a transliteration tool that can transliterate
Shahmukhi into Gurmukhi and vice versa. I have been in touch with persons
from Indian Punjab (Writers, Poets, Professors, etc.) and know a lot of
writers, poets, professors from Pakistan as being a Pakistani. Punjabi is my
mother tongue. It was a little back ground.

According my best knowledge, Mirpur Panjabi and Pahari-Potwari are one and
the same dialect of Panjabi. One other thing is that Seraiki’s and Pahari’s
so called leaders claim that Seraiki and Pahari are different languages than
that of Punjabi. I have closely worked with Pahari speaking people and I
found no difference between Punjabi and Pahari. Let me quote an interesting
example, one leading person (I do not want to disclose his name) who claims
that Pahari is different from Punjabi. His father always calls himself
“Panjabi Tagga” (mean bull of Punjab) and he never called “Pahari Tagga”.
Other main point is that he always wanted me to build one version of the
Punjabi transliteration tool that can convert Pahari in Gurmukhi and vice
versa and I always said to him that Gurmukhi is Punjabi then why you want to
have transliteration tool between Pahari and Punjabi (Gurmukhi). For
Seraiki, I have a very little interaction with Seraiki people, but they also
unable to give answers of my simple and straight forward questions in a
straight way and always talk about the language politics (For details one
can read the book “Language Politics in Pakistan” by Dr. Tariq Rahman, a
great scholar). Spokenly, Seraiki, Jataki, Majhi, Pahari are different but
when they are written they are same. All these points are my personal
experience and knowledge. I could be wrong at certain points. Any way my
point is that for the CLDR project, PA-GURU and PA-ARAB are two best tags to
represent the Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi. If Seraiki, Pahari and Hindko are
different languages even then the two tags mentioned earlier are good
options for Punjabi.

Best regards,

---

M. G. Abbas MALIK

Doctorant à l'ED MSTII,

Univ. Joseph Fourier

GETALP - LIG, IMAG - campus,

BP53675 385,  rue de la Bibliothèque

38041 Grenoble Cedex 9, France

Tel:         +33 (0) 4 76 51 48 17

Fax:         +33 (0) 4 76 44 66 75

Mob:      +33 (0) 6 74 50 46 01

Mel:        Abbas.Malik at imag.fr, abbas.malik at gmail.com

Url:          <http://www.puran.info/> www.puran.info

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---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:22:58 -0400

Abbas Malik scripsit:

> Spokenly, Seraiki, Jataki, Majhi, Pahari are different but
> when they are written they are same. 

ISO 639-3 language tags are (a) founded on spoken languages, and (b)
tend toward fine splitting rather than lumping.   Fortunately, their
use will be entirely optional.

-- 
"The serene chaos that is Courage, and the phenomenon   [email-masked]
of Unopened Consciousness have been known to the        John Cowan
Great World eons longer than Extaboulism."
"Why is that?" the woman inquired.
"Because I just made that word up", the Master said wisely.
        --Kehlog Albran, The Profit             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan