Open Source North East – An Initiative

“Open Source Northeast” is one more initiative from Prag Foundation. This is supposed to be the first magazine from NE india promoting Open Source for development of North Eastern States. The theme is very novel. The founders are very much motivated to share the benefits of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in building Information Communication Technology (ICT) capability for development and success in today’s emerging Knowledge Society.

Volume-I of the magazine covers a few interesting topics such as  Open Access and Open Course Ware. You will find links to various organization, especially the universities,  that houses various courses online and free for all. In India ,a similar kind of initiative is taking place in IIT Bombay (http://www.dep.iitb.ac.in/). I think there will be much more information about open course ware in the coming issues of the magazine.

If you want to buy a PC for yourself here are the tips for you in the Know How section. A good review of OpenOffice is also in place as per the software reviewed in this issue.

I feel Open Source Northeast is a good start. Contents are good and well written except for some occasional typos. There are lot more scope to improve the current layout  to create better look and feel experience.

For all those interested to read out the mag should find a soft copy here. And please dont forget to leave your comments to editor. !

অসমীয়া – Assamese

An interesting article about the origin of my mother tounge .. This has appeared in a post in assam_in_bangalore yahoo group ..

 

” …To start with, the earliest form of Assamese appeared in the form of Chharyapadas. Chharyapadas were hymns written by traveling Buddhists in what is called an intentional language. According to what I believe, they are a variation of the Magadhi Prakrit language. Much later when they were translated by Tibetan and Buddhist scholars alike, it was seen that the Assamese language draws negatives, participles, verb forms, etc. from few of the Chharyapadas. This is 7^th century that I am talking about. The Chharyapada manuscripts are now at the National Archives of Nepal. Coming to your question about the script: in the 7^th century, the Assamese by far remained a variation of Prakrit and Apabhrahmsa. Modern Assamese script draws from the Eastern Nagari script, like Bengali. What you heard is not hearsay. From the Assamese language, there were four dialects: Eastern, Central, Kamrupiya, and Goalparia. Christian Missionaries started work in the Sibsagar area in the middle of the 19^th century and the Eastern dialect spoken here came in focus of the British (as this was the documented local language). The British then made Eastern Assamese dialect the official language of the state. It was used in courts and offices. This is how we speak today, although traces of Kamrupiya Axomiya have been found as early as the 5^th – 6^th century in the writings of Xuanzang, a Chinese Buddhist monk. Almost all Indian and South-East Asian language trace their roots to the Brahmi script. Tibeto, Sino, Tai, etc. scripts all belong to the Brahmic family of scripts. The Brahmic family includes Devanagari (for Hindi, etc.), Eastern Nagari (Bishnupuriya Manipuri, Assamese, Bengali), etc.So you are correct that the modern Assamese we speak today came into force sometime in the middle of the 19^th century. The Assamese script follows from Eastern Nagari (a variation of Brahmi) and not Tibeto-Sino- Tai; even when the British wrote it, it was in the Eastern Nagari script. (As someone pointed) Srimanta Sankardeva’s script was a variation of the Eastern Nagari script. …” Zeeshan