Tex Texin wrote:

>
> Peter,
>
> bidi (or BiDi) is short for bidirectional.

So you're asking about boustrophedon writing? or what?

> 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.

On what grounds? There are three different standardized scripts used for
Syriac, Assyrian is a dialect of Akkadian, and Neo-Aramaic is written in
many ways.

> 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?

It's used by programmers? What does it mean to them?

> 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@...