by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/02/03 08:31 -08:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/02/03/524139.aspx
You'd think we were at a Rolling Stones concert or something!
I do love to talk about those Language Interface Packs.
We now have not only the Nepali and Konkani LIPs, but we have two more -- for Bengali and Malayalam!
A Bit About Bengali বাংলা (Bāṇlā / Bangla)
Bengali is spoken in the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, comprising Bangladesh (where it is spoken by about 110 million people) and the Indian state of West Bengal (where it is spoken by 55 million people). With more than 200 million speakers it is the second most widely spoken language on the Indian subcontinent and among the 5 languages with the most native speakers worldwide. Bengali is official language of Bangladesh, one of India’s official languages and official language of the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura.
The dialect spoken in Kolkata, capital of West Bengal, is considered standard for Bengali as it is spoken in India. The dialect spoken in Bangladesh is different.Bengali belongs to the Eastern Indo-Aryan languages which are part of the Indo-European language family. Together with its closest relatives Assemese and Oriya, Bengali is the most eastern of this large language family.
Bengali is written in the alphasyllabary called Bangla or Kutila-lipi which highly resembles the Devanagari script used for Sanskrit, Hindi or Nepali. The script consists of 12 vowel characters and 52 consonant characters. Like in all alphasyllabaries, or abugidas, characters for consonants have embedded vowels (or an extra diacritic showing that there is no vowel).
A Bit About Malayalam മലയാളം:
Not to be confused by Malay (which is spoken in Malaysia), Malayalam is spoken by approx. 35 million people in the state of Kerala in southern India. It is that state's official language and one of India's official languages.
Malayalam belongs to the Southern branch of the Dravidian languages and is most closely related to Tamil. The Dravidian languages are not related to the Indo-European languages spoken in the north of India (so that the term "Indic languages" is referring to a geographical, not a linguistic group).
Malayalam has a script of its own, an abugida of the Brahmic family. Like in all abugidas, or alphasyllabaries, characters for consonants have embedded vowels (or an extra diacritic showing that there is no vowel).
Now as I pointed out in the post Does Bengali sorting work?, the collation support for Bengali is not a part of XP SP2. And Malayalam is in the same boat there (you have to wait for Vista to get that particular feature).
But the LIPs themselves are available for XP SP2 right now!
This post brought to you by "ഷ" and "ষ" (U+0d37 and U+09b7, a.k.a. MALAYALAM LETTER SSA and BENGALI LETTER SSA)
# Maurits on Friday, February 03, 2006 11:55 AM:
# Michael S. Kaplan on Friday, February 03, 2006 12:20 PM:
# Shailesh on Friday, February 03, 2006 1:36 PM:
# Michael S. Kaplan on Friday, February 03, 2006 1:43 PM:
# Raj Nair on Friday, February 03, 2006 2:16 PM:
# മലയാളി on Friday, February 03, 2006 2:54 PM:
# Kaippally on Monday, February 13, 2006 10:12 PM:
# Michael S. Kaplan on Tuesday, February 14, 2006 12:15 AM:
referenced by
2007/06/15 The last XP LIP? We'll head it off at the Pas[hto]
2007/06/02 Azeri zeriouz LIP releaze
2007/03/03 And it won't cost you an arm[enia] or a leg, either!
2006/12/01 Curious Georg[ian] gets a LIP
2006/10/31 Mapudungun is not a map to a dungeon
2006/10/13 Local experiences in Norway: the Nynorsk LIP!
2006/09/25 And then came Inuktitut (ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ)
2006/08/17 You don't order Tatar sauce for your Filet-o-Fish!
2006/07/25 I bless the rains down in Afrika[ans]
2006/07/17 Appreciation, embarrassment, and redirecting thanks
2006/07/05 The one with all of the language info
2006/07/01 Give a lady Urdu? (her due?)
2006/06/27 I Tswana know what you're thinking
2006/06/23 Do they grow beets in Luxembourg?
2006/06/22 Quechua me if you can!
2006/05/16 Persian? Or Farsi?
2006/04/06 It's not Telugu [తెలుగు] Tubbies (and it's certainly not Punjabi [ਪੰਜਾਬੀ] Tubbies!)
2006/04/06 'c' is for click sounds, and they're good enough for me
2006/03/16 Even cooler than The Maltese Falcon
2006/03/16 Oh Kannada... (ಕನ್ನಡ)
2006/03/05 Microsoft is giving people some LIP again