Re: ISO 6438, the Niamey keyboard, and ISO/TC46/SC4/WG1

Peter_Constable@... wrote:

>
> John Hudson wrote on 05/14/2003 12:07:25 PM:
>
> > I don't have details on hand, but the book in which I encountered the
> > Niamey keyboard layout is entitled _A Thesaurus of African Languages_
> > edited by Michael Mann and David Dalby (London. 1987). I note that there
> > are two copies currently offered for sale on www.abe.com.
>
> At US$100, I'm glad to find that the library on our center has a copy. The
> entire thing is done without capitals (except the title page, which the
> publisher would have done) in order to reinforce their idea that capitals
> aren't needed for the orthographies of African languages -- a bit of
> overkill, I think.
>
> Anyway, I've put info on this keyboard layout on the Web at:
>
> http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=IntlNiameyKybd

I've always found the Mann & Dalby book perversely fascinating (but I
photocopied only a handful of pages presenting some orthographic
specimens and language classifications). For some reason they got it in
their heads that it would be a Good Thing to discard the
more-than-50-year-old Africa Alphabet, which has been adapted to quite a
few languages, in favor of a completely new scheme that would require
not only that everyone learn a bunch of new symbols, many of which would
not be used in their particular language, but that every typewriter in
Africa be junked. The absense of capitals in what is still a roman-based
script is especially problematic since it has no _other_ device for
distinctive marking of boundaries or the other things capitals do in
roman -- such as Arabic script accomplishes by flourishing many final
letters, or Javanese does by using a distinctive form anywhere in an
affected word. (Now maybe if their missionaries had come from mainland
Southeast Asia ...)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...