Tex:
The concern I have in this discussion is a lack of care in use of
terminology. For instance, "bidi language" is absolutely meaningless.
Languages do not have a directionality! What you probably want to say is
"languages that are written with a RTL script".
The term "bidi(rectional)" is not without problems, as noted by some
responses in this thread. It has come to be equated by some in the
software industry as synonymous with RTL, but that really isn't
appropriate, IMO. A script has a basic underlying directionality, which in
some cases is RTL. Some of those scripts -- *but not necessarily all* --
require bidi implementations in software because numbers within text are
encoded most significant digit first, which happens to make them LTR. The
software implementation that can be said unequivocably to be bidi. As to
whether we can say the script is "bidi" depends on a cultural bias: in
thinking about number representations in text, if we consider the most
significant digits to be first, then the numbers are written LTR, but if
we consider the *least* significant digit to be first, then the numbers
are RTL like the matrix text. I recall asking on the unicode list maybe
two years ago how Arabic- and Hebrew-script writers wrote numbers: MSDF or
LSDF. As I recall, the response was not uniform.
In talking about languages, if you really want to express things in terms
of "bidi", then I think the best thing to say would be "languages that
require bidirectional-text implementations".
Another terminological issue:
> I am under the impression that Yiddish is sometimes written
transliterated to
> english
You don't transliterate text of one language into another language. Going
from language to language is translation. Transliteration goes from script
to script. What you mean to say is "transliterated into Latin script".
- Peter
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Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485