Michael Everson wrote:

>
> At 08:42 -0400 2005-08-15, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > > Glyph based input can be helpful for learning to type, all right, but
> >> it isn't inherently "better" than QWERTY-based input.
> >
> >It is if you've never had any reason to learn the roman alphabet.
>
> You will have if you lived in Liberia, since Vai is what this thread
> was about at the beginning. And in many parts of the world, the only
> keyboards available will be engraved with Latin script.

I'm glad you've realized that there's no great call for computerized
Vai. Scribner & Cole explain that it's the _third_ script in the typical
person's repertoire, after roman and Arabic.

We are, however, talking about Tamil. And Cree. And Chinese.

There are millions of potential customers in Tamil Nadu (and the other
national scripts of India add additional hundreds of millions of users)
and in China, and if Mr. Gates chooses not to recognize that, and
produce keyboards suited to their scripts rather than forcing them to
use a non-intuitive segmental replacement for their own scripts, that's
his insensitivity and folly.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...