Michael Everson wrote:

>
> At 13:35 -0400 2005-08-22, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> >Do you really not see that you're requiring the
> >billions of non-roman-users in the world to
> >change their lifelong habits -- and their
> >centuries or millennia of cultural tradition --
> >for your convenience?
>
> I didn't invent Pinyin, or Pinyin-romanized input

For the umpteenth time, pinyin isn't used by anyone after third or
fourth grade. It's for foreigners.

> for Chinese. I didn't invent Roma-ji input for
> Japanese. The Japanese did that. I didn't devise

Japan had romaji before it had roman-input computers.

> the QWERTY-based keyboards for Devanagari or
> Arabic or Hebrew. Apple did that.

Hebrew is irrelevant; aside from its direction it presents no special
challenges to the typist. (Israelis react almost violently to the
inclusion even of the sin/shin dot in Modern Hebrew typesetting.)

The Arabic keyboard bears no relation to QWERTY, but Apple's WorldScript
I took care of all the contextual forms automatically as well as the
most common ligatures. (It left out several characters needed for fully
pointed text, however, such as dagger alif and hamzatu l-wasl.)

> I did devise QWERTY-based keyboards for Inuktitut
> and Cherokee, alongside other keyboards. Both
> have their uses.
>
> I have devised a QWERTY-based Vai keyboard which
> seems to work very well. A non-QWERTY-based Vai

Seems to whom? How many Vai people with computers have checked it out?

> keyboard would be hard pressed to give users
> access to 294 characters plus digits and ASCII
> punctuation without deadkeys (since 48 x 4 =
> 192). Moreover, Vai speakers (who number 105,000)
> live in a country whose official language is
> English, so it's not as though the Latin script
> is unknown to them. A QWERTY-based keyboard for
> Vai would hardly be a curse upon them.

It would hardly be optimal.

What is so offensive is your assumption that the Western way is the best
way -- and that you refuse to recognize that it isn't.

> >Shift was devised for a particular quirk of
> >contemporary roman, cyrillic, and greek.
>
> Shift was long used in other traditions. For

You have a curiously short notion of "long."

> Arabic shaping fragments, for instance. The 1962
> Standard Hindi Typewriter used shift states to
> access half-forms in some instances (MA, M-) and
> different letters in others (U, TTA; DA, DDA).

This is not 1962. In 2005, computers can be expected to do all the
automatic shape-changes automatically.

> >Option isn't used for any ordinary English
> >characters, and Shift-Option is an immense
> >imposition on the typist.
>
> Façade, naïve, résumé. All English words
> correctly spelled with diacritical marks. In
> Ireland we use option for áéíóú and shift-option
> for ÁÉÍÓÚ and this causes no particular hardship.
> (I say this as one who typesets books in Irish
> regularly.)

All those words are correctly spelled without the diacritics.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...