suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
> <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
> > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
> > <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
> >
> > > That's done phonetically as consonant(s) plus vowel
> >
> > Clarification: Chracters are entered phonetically by typing
> > consonant(s) plus vowel
>
> I find that this is a trend with most non roman scripts. Japanese
> has had syllabic input but since so often it is easier just to use
> an unaltered roman keyboard, most Japanese use a roman
> transliteration. Certainly for Tamil, transliteration is the
> accepted way - no one would ever use the phonetic input order of
> Tamil letters!

Remember that romaji was _already_ a noticeable presence in Japanese
writing, so no new skills or knowledge need to be added to what the
schoolchild has already learned.

Perhaps ignorance of this basic fact is what led computer engineers to
think that roman-based input is appropriate for other syllabaries, where
there _was_ no tradition of roman spelling.

> For Vai it is even more complicated since there is such a
> discrepancy between the superset and the common use set. How could a
> Vai literate ever decide which symbol they wanted easily and not
> create two ways to spell a word.

Why would anyone _want_ to write Vai with a computer? If there's any
accuracy at all in Scribner & Cole, the Vai script is used in a very
limited set of contexts where computerization wouldn't be appropriate
anyway.

(When the Vai syllabary proved too big for one font, we simply scanned
script specimens and dropped them into the WWS text.)

((And, computer engineers, don't start that bullshit about fonts
accommodating thousands of characters -- in 1993 they couldn't.
Period.))
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...