Re: Reduced Vai Repertoire

Michael Everson wrote:

>
> At 09:57 +0000 2005-08-22, Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> > > > But one of Unicode's principals says they have to do romanization.
> >>
> >> Wherever did you get that idea?
> >
> >Probably from:
> >
> >'I will develop a QWERTY-based keyboard layout, because that is what
> >they will have on their hardware, and as they are all familiar with
> >the Latin alphabet (English being the official language of Liberia).'
> >
> >- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/message/5334
>
> I don't do this on behalf of the Unicode
> consortium. I have made such a keyboard so that I
> can type Vai text. I've been typing MS Vai 1 and
> the Book of Ndole. It works, though there are
> some intersting gaps that crop up from time to
> time, with long vowels and nasal vowels for
> instance.

How _you_ like to type Vai isn't relevant at all to how Vai people like
to type Vai. It's no more natural for them to write Vai in the roman (or
arabic) script than it is for you to write Irish in Ogam. You can
(perhaps) if you need to, but you wouldn't want to have it as your only
option.

> >and, as to Michael Everson being a Unicode principal, probably his
> >record of contributions, e.g.:
> >
> >'I have helped to encode Balinese, Braille,
> >Buginese, Buhid, Cherokee, Coptic, Cuneiform,
> >Cypriot, Deseret, Ethiopic, Georgian,
> >Glagolitic, Gothic, Hanunóo, Khmer, Limbu,
> >Linear B, Mongolian, Myanmar, New Tai Lue, N'Ko,
> >Ogham, Old Italic, Old Persian, Osmanya,
> >Phoenician, Runic, Shavian, Sinhala, Tagalog,
> >Tagbanwa, Tai Le, Thaana, Tibetan, Ugaritic,
> >Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, and Yi,
> >as well as many characters belonging to the
> >Latin, Greek,
> >Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts.'
> >
> >- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/message/5400
>
> This still doesn't mean that Unicode has anything
> to do with keyboard specifications.

Nor did I claim it did. The person who made the suggestion was
identified as "a Unicode principal."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...