suzmccarth wrote:

> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Michael Everson
> <everson@...> wrote:
> will shift significantly. Vai literates will have to go to school to
> learn how to input in Vai. Traditional Vai literates will not likely
> have this opportunity.

OK, maybe I am jsut being dumb here, but then I am asking for help.

If what you say above is true, then wouldn't organizations both in and
out of school spring up to meet the need?

I look at the variety of opportunities that people have here in my
region, where there is a wide range of language barriers and educational
expectation variations, and see that there is more chance to keep
learning even if you don't get it quite right during traditional
schooling. Especially for practical skills such as reading and writing
and typing.

OTOH, it is true that many people fall through the cracks. But that is a
societal problem, not one related to the material being taught.

Is it or will it be significantly different in Liberia?

>
> If we accept that computers will only be accessible for those
> who read the English alphabet that is one thing. I understand
> that that is your position, and maybe it is realistic.
>
>
> > QWERTY deadkeys solves the problem smashingly.
>
> Deadkeys are hardly intuitive either.

It is a pretty simple concept though, you have to admit. Especially if
your past education does not provide you with any other expectations
that there should be a on->one correspondence between key presses and
"characters".

Hmm, that last sentence reminds me of the issue of resetting
expectations for sw engineers and others that "one character is not the
same as one byte". Maybe the new mantra should be "once character is not
the same as one key press".

BTW, the QWERTY kb is pretty arbitrary and many (Not including me
unfortunately) have learned to type without looking at the kb itself. I
guess this is some sot of cognitive/motor skill. Does anyone know of any
research that shows if the cognitive difficulty increases when methods
for typing become more complex then "one key press->one char" ? I
especially wonder if there are fMRI studies underway...

And what if we had no kb at all? I read a few weeks ago (forget if I
posted about it here) about some research at IBM that was stroke based -
I forget the details but IIRC instead of writing chars explicitly, or
arbitrary "gestures" there were some other strokes that were more
natural (for English it appears) anyway.

Perhaps for some of the languages we are discussing, such methods hold
much more promise then worrying about kb input at all.

>
> >
> > If you can differentiate them with a pencil, you can learn to do
> so
> > on a keyboard.
>
> The point is that Vai literates do not differentiate these
> phonemes when writing with a pencil.

One of the features of the IBM scheme, IIRC, is that it is not phonetic
based at all.

> And that people read the roadsigns? Hmm. I remember being
> entertained by a story told by a Cree man about driving from his
> home town to Toronto and back without being able to read the
> roadsigns. Apparently he got his drivers license without being
> able to read also.

I think there is a big difference between "reading" a road sign and
"understanding it". By the former I mean it involves language skills,
by the latter it is more of a contextual cognitive understanding. And
for many driving tasks, being able to read signs is not really
necessary, even driving cross-prefecture. Heck, my mother can read fine,
but she sucks at directions, so ignores any signs that are not related
to her predetermined path, and doesn't need the rest except to provide
visual familiarity that all is OK.

I think this jives with people being able to drive successfully where
they can't read the language...

>
> I tried your roadsign idea out on a couple who worked for years
> in Cameroun. They were mildly amused.

I dunno. It seems likely you could navigate without seeing signs at all
- there are generally other visual or contextual clues as to how to act
at any given time or where to turn, which don't involve reading at all.
I think it would be hard to test for practically speaking, unless it was
some sort of complex driving simulator.