Hello to everyone at Keyman management and its community. This is my first communication. I am pleased to draw your kind consideration about an error in naming the Keyman keyboard made for typing Nepalbhasa, the original language of Nepal.
First, on behalf of the Nepalbhasa user community, I am pleased to extend my heartiest congratulations and warm thanks to the Keyman keyboard team for making both traditional and romanized keyboards for Nepalbhasa. This has given us a long awaited opportunity to type Nepal-lipi (the letters of Nepalbhasa) on our computers smoothly. Before this opportunity, we have used Nepal-lipi font on a different language code and followed a converter (www.nepal-lipi.com/converter) of another script and convert that into Nepal-lipi font. The new opportunity given by Keyman has become a very useful support to use Nepal-lipi directly on the PC and online. Our Nepalbhasa user community and I are very grateful about this great opportunity and the contribution to preserve and promotion of Nepalbhasa and its letters Nepal-lipi by your worthy team.
However, the title of the Keyboard ID as “Newa Traditional (Nepal Bhasa)” and “Newa Romanized (Nepal Bhasa)” and shortened name such as “Newari (new-Newa-NP) Newa Romanized” of both of these keyboard on the language selector bar on PCs are confusing while the term Newari is regarded among informed Nepalbhasa speakers as a disrespectful term for Nepalbhasa. This is because the Nepalbhasa speakers had to struggle against the suppression of Nepalbhasa by the new rulers and changing their language name to Newari by these rulers.
Nepalbhasa speakers had to fight against the suppressive domination for nearly a century. Finally the Nepalbhasa speakers won the battle in September, 1995 when the Government of Nepal reinstated Nepalbhasa as a national language and gave directions to all concerned to call it Nepalbhasa thereafter instead of Newari. This direction has been published on Nepal Government mouthpeace Gorkhapatra and its English paper, the Rising Nepal in black and white.
Consequently, many government agencies and the informed public has resumed using the proper name of Nepalbhasa on their documents and products. Therefore, I thought it is my duty to remind the Keyman keyboard team and the web experts and the public online specially the Nepalbhasa keyboard writers to respect the name of Nepalbhasa and the struggle the leaders who sacrificed their life to regain the correct name of their language.
I understand the present young generation of Nepal may not aware of these struggle and sacrifice and may have used the term unintentionally. But it is never too late to correct the mistake to stop the continued use of wrong term for a language.
Therefore, may I suggest the respected Keyman Keyboard management and the Nepalbhasa keyboard writer brothers to correct the error and simply name the keyboard as “Nepalbhasa Traditional” and “Nepalbhasa Romanized” while showing the short name as “NB (Traditional)” and “NB (Romanized)”. This will not only give due respect to the past elders who contributed to protect and preserve their language Nepalbhasa for us but this simple revision will also encourage the new generation to know the value of the name of Nepalbhasa and how to use it on their documents, projects and products. Thank you and kind regards,
Suwarn Vajracharya, Ph.D.
Admin, www.nepal-lipi.com