Peter,

bidi (or BiDi) is short for bidirectional.

For Syriac, I was asking in a very oblique way if Syriac is a script, language
or both. It was suggested to me that I replace Syriac with Assyrian and
Neo-Aramaic languages.

I am under the impression that Yiddish is sometimes written transliterated to
english, for people that speak the language but do not read hebrew. My bubbie
told me. So nu? (Just teasing. I don't know if any Yiddish books are written
in latin, or it is just used for short phrases in otherwise English books.)
;-)


Since I know you are an expert on languages, I have a feeling your questions
are pointing to some mistake I am making in the way I asked about bidi. But I
missed the error. Perhaps "bidi" is only used by programmers and it doesn't
show up in language discussions?

tex

"Peter T. Daniels" wrote:

>
> Tex Texin wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am fleshing out a small page on bidi and I would like to list scripts and
> > languages written in scripts that are bidi.
> > I would appreciate your help in validating the information I have. I grabbed
> > it from some other web pages and some of it seems specious or confused to me.
> >
> > For bidi scripts I have:
>
> What is "bidi"?
>
> > Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Thaana
> >
> > For bidi languages I have:
> >
> > Adighe, Algerian Tribal, Arabic, Avesta, Baluchi, Berber, Dargwa,
> > Farsi/Persian, Hausa, Hebrew, Ingush, Jawi/Javanese Kashmiri, Kazakh, Kurdish
> > (Sorani), Kök Turki, Ladino, Landha, Maldivian, Manchu, Middle Mongolian,
> > Morrocan Arabic, old Malay, Pashto, Sindhi, Sogdian, South Arabic, Swahili,
> > Syriac, Tajik, Thaana, Uighur, Urdu, Uzbek, Yiddish.
> >
> > Is Thaana both a script and a language?
> > Are some of the languages in fact scripts? (Jawi?)
>
> Thaana is the script of the Divehi (Maldives) languages.
>
> Jawi is a variety of Indonesian script.
>
> > Should I replace the language Syriac with Assyrian and Neo-Aramaic? Others?
>
> That depends entirely on what you mean.
>
> > I saw Azerbaijani listed a RTL on one site. I thought it was written in latin
> > and cyrillic. Is it every written in an RTL script?
>
> Being a language of Islam, of course there was at one time an
> Arabic-based script for it.
>
> > I am hoping not to have to research each item individually.
> > For this page, we really only need current languages, historic ones are not
> > needed. Including historic ones is not a problem provided they are not
> > controversial or add ambiguity or confusion of any sort. IE If you can point
> > out the ones that might be confusing or unnecessary that will help.
> >
> > As some languages are written in multiple scripts, I am considering
> > identifying language-script pairs rather than just listing languages.
> > Comments, as to whether that is better approach? (e.g. Yiddish-hebrew vs.
> > Yiddish-latin)
>
> Well, now, I suppose that depends on what "bidi" means. Where is Yiddish
> written with a roman alphabet?
> --
> Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...
>
>
> www.egroups.com/group/qalam - world's writing systems.
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>
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