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

> Richard Wordingham wrote:
> > [...]
> > Thank you. That certainly seems to be the most connected Yi as text
> > rather than pictures on the Internet. I'm left wondering if there is
> > any 'wild' Yi on the Internet. Googling for a few Yi words yielded
> > nothing.
>
> I would be quite surprised of the contrary!
>
> Even not considering the insuperable difficulty of writing Yi

characters on

> a computer (ever seen a YI IME!?)

You can get one from SIL! One could also knock up a web page IME,
though they are quite irksome to use.

> It takes much more than a bunch of characters, or even a couple of

blocks in

> Unicode or a couple of hours per week taught in elementary schools,

to turn

> a group of *spoken* dialects into a literary language.

That's not the impression I get from statements such as, 'An amazing
outpouring of work has been done in this writing system, including
textbooks from primers up to university level, dictionaries, grammars,
collections of traditional texts and stories, translations of material
form Chinese and new original literature.' in
http://www.sil.org/asia/ldc/plenary_papers/david_bradley.pdf .
However, the potential users do only amount to about a million and a
half people out of about six million in the official ethnic group.
However, the user base may be too small, too poor and too
ill-educated. I had thought official support of the script might have
gone so far as it being used in the website of the Liangshan Yi
Autonomous Prefecture.

Richard.