Re: How about a typology for input methods

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@...>
wrote:

> suzmccarth wrote:
> > Thank you for personalizing this, Marco.
>
> :-) It was my blunder, anyway... I wanted a name with a short "i"

because I

> thought vowel "i" went of the left of its consonant. But that's

devanagari

> and other scripts: for Tamil, I should have chosen a name with

an "e"...

I just assumed that you were thinking of Devanagari, the word Hindi
to be precise, with its preceding and following i. Tamil has
preceding e, ee, and ai but also o, oo, and au have parts that both
precede and follow, so half the vowels are out of sequence. They
are full size characters, not diacritics. Lots of reshaping too.

> whether visual or phonetic sequence is used, that has nothing to

do with

> Chinese-like IME's.

The new syllablic IME looks like Chinese IME, sort of.

>
> Tamil has only about 50 basic signs (letters, matras, etc.), so it

makes

> perfectly sense to assign one letter per key, as it is for English

or any

> other alphabet-like keyboard.

Well, more like 30 something. But the Tamil call the aksharas their
alphabet, so 247 units. These are the visually constant and
distinct units. A phoneme, without support of a constant visual
support is too abstract to be processed by everyone. Some people in
any language community are never able to manipulate phonemes easily,
members of qalam aside, as I am so often reminded.

> > No, Microsoft was asked explicitly to provide an IME in order to
> > enable input of each visually distinct akshara and Microsoft
> > refused.
>
> Correctly so, IMHO. It's sound like a silly request

silly to whom, westerners, come on...

>>now some research centres are moving
> > to handwriting input and speech inut because they are so
> > dissatisfied with trying to input in order of phonetic sequence.
>
> That sounds like moving from a bicycle to a space shuttle because

one is

> dissatisfied with the height of the saddle. Isn't it easier to fix

the

> height of the saddle?

I totally agree with you here. But it seems that there is a bit of
a crisis - how can the less literate keyboard with so many issues to
be resolved. It is the lack of visual input that has precipitated
this crisis. Not that input in visual sequence is the answer. I
don't think there is a consensus yet on what to do.

>
> > FOR ME, typology and input method ARE related.
>
> I might agree, here.

You agree that it is for me - but should not be a norm in the
industry?

>
> > The way I think about it, I see Tamil as having syllabic
> > characteristcs and then I can look for the syllabic IME.
>
> I definitely disagree, here.

Well, it happened. I looked for the syllabic IME - it does exist.
What's to disagree?

> On the other hand, it's not a problem for an operating system to

ship with

> three or more different Tamil keyboard drivers, e.g., "Visual

sequence",

> "Phonetic sequence", and even a crazy "Syllabic IME".

Haven't seen visual sequence for Unicode, I think it might be hard
to implement coding, I have no idea here, maybe you could tell me
how possible this is - or maybe they just can't agree on this.
However, the syllabic IME has the ITRANS transliteration built in
and that is a disaster for Tamil.

Suzanne

>
> _ Marco