--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

>
> Do you think Richard Sproat's main criticism, that the last chapter
> didn't include a discussion of the computer technology available in

the

> early 1990s, is valid?

Not at all. It is only in retrospect that the impact of innovations
are really understood. To have the above comment as a 'main
criticism', something you have left out, is surely a high accolade.
After all, every discussion of anything leaves something out.

It disturbs me, however, that the most common way to keyboard most non-
alphabetic scripts is with the roman alphabet and transliteration.

I would prefer to see a greater effort put into glyph-based
keyboarding. Chinese is the only script which has full functional and
standardized phonetic keyboarding as well as many innovative and
workable methods for glyph-based entry. Q9 was even tested on mentally
handicapped children in HK and found to be successful.

It was only a consistent and committed interaction of study of script
and technology that brought about the increasingly intuitive glyph-
based keyboarding in Chinese.

While methods of keyboarding for Chinese cannot be trasferred to other
scripts, although sometimes I wonder, certainly some of the principles
can be.

Japanese did have glyph-based keyboarding, syllable level, but the
awkwardness of the shift key is what makes it unattractive. Then they
developed a thumbshift keyboard but I don't believe it took off.

However, it is recognized that the use of computer and an input method
that converts kana to kanji has altered the writing sytle of the
average Japanese.

Suzanne