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

>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.

The Chinese have wonderful glyph-based input methods, but the best for
me are from Taiwan or HK. The Chinese gov't wants everyone to learn
Pinyin input, which uses the qwerty keyboard, so this is a prefered
choice in mainland China. I think keyboards are irrelevant when you
are talking about the Han Chinese characters. You have to have an
access method of some kind but they do exist.

BTW thanks for rexplaining about the editing process in WWS on Tamil.
And some day I might be curious about seeing Steever's original
article - it is a matter of pure curiosity since I have been
collecting examples of how the Tamil writing system is represented
from Diderot, through Isaac Taylor on. I'd like to find the original
Jesuit copies from earlier. It is not important just a trivial
curiosity. Also I have seen relevant phrases from the Tolkapiyyam
translated into English on the Unicode list. What I meant to say was
that the Tamil developers I communicated with, prefer the encoding of
pure consonants and pure vowels, and syllables, hence alphasyllabary.
They find the consonant plus inherent a, the 'abugida' column, as they
call it, an awkward column in an encoding sense. This is beyond me
really , but I do know they like to emphasize the difference between
other Indic scripts and Tamil. It is only a metter of curiosity not
to argue about. Sorry for rambling on about such a detail. And they do
indeed know the terms abugida and alphasyllabary.

Suzanne