suzmccarth wrote:

> When I was in Beijing I visited the apartment of a calligrapher, a
> woman, and her teenage son. He was using a Pinyin IME to instant
> message with friends just as quickly as my kids do in English.
> However, I asked the mother what method she used and by the look on
> her face realized that this calligrapher could not use the computer at
> all. How humiliating for her to have to get her son to handle even
> email! Her generation are not fluent in Pinyin and obviously she had
> not learned a difficult glyph-based method like canjie and did not
> know about the new input methods which are easier. She spoke some
> English and was educated but truly hampered by her lack of access to
> digital literacy.

Does she consider herself "hampered"?

It looks like you're the one trying to impose your computer-centered
literacy on others!

One of the world's leading Indo-Europeanists, Eric Hamp, does not use a
typewriter, let alone a computer, and his bibliography may well be the
most extensive of any scholar in history. (He does not eschew computers,
but he has others use them for him.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...