--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:

> At 22:05 +0000 2005-08-30, suzmccarth wrote:
> >--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Michael Everson
> ><everson@...> wrote:

> I never said anything about academic qualifications. I have been
> dismissed by some because I do practical technical work that people
> actually use, instead of having worked to get some additional letters
> after my name.

Quoth the man who under the Linnaean system would get his name after
letters!

> The brief is 340 characters.

From whom? Does it need 30 items of punctuation? Thai keyboards make
do with the following 11 items of ASCII punctuation:

percent (%), underscore, plus (+), hyphen (-), quote ("), comma (,),
full stop (.), left parenthesis, right parenthesis, question mark (?),
space

Native: yamok (U+0E46) and paiyan noi (U+0E2F).

Actually, flicking through a Thai magazine called 'Chiwit Rak' (RTGS -
the website is actually www.cheewitrak.com ), literally 'Life of
Love', I found the following Western punctuation:

Space, opening double quote, closing double quote, ellipsis, left
parenthesis, right parenthesis, question mark (?), exclamation mark
(!), full-stop. I may have missed some - I didn't notice any paiyan
nois in the text, but they should be needed (e.g. to write 'Bangkok'),
even if a lot of Thais use yamok instead when writing the compound
symbol paiyan yai ( = paiyan noi, lo ling, paiyan noi). The question
mark seems to be a matter of the author's style - some stories used
it, others didn't.

Arguably percent, comma and hyphen only belong with numbers, which are
in the Roman script. Full stop is also used in abbreviations, e.g. in
addresses. 'Ko, tho, mo, full stop' (4 characters) is actually quite
a common written form for spoken _Krungthep_ 'Bangkok'. Hyphen is
found in prices and telephone numbers. I have seen 'fax' in Thai
(though it's not clear whether it should have a maitaikhu to shorten
the vowel), but in the advertisements in that magazine I could only
find it in the Roman alphabet. I even found 'Tel.' rather then the
equivalent Thai abbreviation in a few adverts. Bank details and
addresses in adverts often appear in English.

I don't know what's normally done for mobile phone numbers. I found
one advert that gave the number of a mobile, but that was for a Thai
supermarket in London. I didn't expect to see that in a Thai magazine
(published in Thailand).

For the record, I couldn't find any instances of khomut, unless one
counts a symbol consisting of a heart enclosing another heart - a
publication-specific mark.

> >You offer the 'roadsign literacy hypothesis' as a counter argument
> >to Scribner and Cole's research?
>
> The roadsigns are a fact.

Do Liberians have a tradition of heeding them?

> >it is not outrageous to suggest that Vai people, who are as smart as
> >anyone else, can be tought to type t + a for ta and t + i for ti.
> >
> >After reading Weiben's post I am surprised that you think we are
> >talking about intelligence.
> >
> >http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/message/5565
>
> It seems to me that you have gone out of your way to show how people
> whose writing systems are syllabic have "problems" with alphabetic
> keyboard input. That isn't true for Ethiopic. I don't find Wang's
> post to be relevant.

Ethiopic isn't a true syllabary, certainly not in the same way as Vai
or the kanas. Remember that the original Unicode encoding proposal
was for it to be encoded as an abjad/abugida.

This may be a stupid question, but do the inflectional patterns of a
language affect the native speaker's ability to see an alphasyllabary
as an abugida? In a Semitic language like Amharic the inflected forms
should reveal the composition of the syllable symbols. Unfortunately,
I know little of Tamil morphology and less of Vai.

Richard.